3 Texas men terror plot foiled.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060813/ap_on_re_us/phones_terror_charges

CARO, Mich. - Three Texas men were arraigned Saturday on terrorism-related charges after police found about 1,000 cell phones in their minivan, and prosecutors say they believe the men were targeting a bridge connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas.

But two of the men said they were only trying to buy and sell phones to make money, and one said the money was intended to help pay for his brother's college education.

A magistrate set bond at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes. No pleas were made at the arraignment at a District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Officials have not said what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones. But Caro's police chief said cell phones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said that TracFones are often used by terrorists because they are not traceable.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

"We've been checked by the
FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Tuscola County Prosecutor Mark E. Reene told The Saginaw News that investigators believe the men were targeting the 5-mile long Mackinac Bridge. He declined to say what led investigators to that belief.

Reene and the FBI did not return phone messages Saturday to The Associated Press.

Othman and Maruan Awad Muhareb, both of Mesquite, Texas, and Adham Abdelhamid Othman, of Dallas, were stopped before dawn Friday after they purchased 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart in Caro. Police said they found about 1,000 cell phones in their minivan.

Adham and Louai Othman are brothers and are in their early 20s. Muhareb, 18, is their cousin. All are being held at the Tuscola County Jail, Caro police said.

Muhareb told the magistrate: "This is a misunderstanding." He said he was selling the phones to earn money to help pay for his brother's college education.

Louai Othman's wife, Lina Odeh, said the men were buying the phones to sell to a man in Dallas for a profit of about $5 per phone. She said they were in Michigan because so many people in the Dallas area are doing the same thing that the phones are often sold out.

"I just want everyone to know that they're innocent and they shouldn't be locked up in jail without any evidence," she told The Associated Press.

The arrests in Caro came three days after two men were arrested in Marietta, Ohio, where police said they aroused suspicions when they acknowledged buying about 600 phones in recent months at stores in southeast Ohio.

Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, both 20 and from Detroit suburb of Dearborn, have been charged with two felonies — money laundering in support of terrorism and soliciting or providing support for acts of terrorism — and misdemeanor falsification. A preliminary hearing on the felony counts was set for Tuesday.

Defense lawyers said Houssaiky and Abulhassan planned to resell the phones simply to make money. They say the men were targeted only because they are of Arab descent.

AP
Click to expand...

Maybe there are terrorists behind every tree and Bush in America.
 
Let me get this straight . They go to Wal-Mart and buy phones . Then a guy is going to buy them for a $5 dollar profit to them . I have to wonder why that ol' boy can't go to Wal-Mart himself . I would gladly go out and buy 1,000 phones and make a fiver on each one . Beats working . Something ain't right .
 
All I am saying is that maybe Bush is right and the .gov needs more power to fight the enemy with in.
Unless that is what they want you to think.:(

:tinfoilhat:
 
Something is definitely strange, and true to form the modern media does little to shed light on the situation.

I don't understand why a terrorist group would need 1000 phones to blow up 1 bridge.

OTOH, if they were indeed surveilling the bridge earlier, that's marginally suspicious. Did they suddenly switch careers from photography to cell phone arbitrage?

What happened to journalism? I guess reporting on an alleged crime these days means getting statements from the government and the defendant, then dropping the ball.
 
I don't know about the bridge thing, but it is my understanding that European nations have restricted the pre-paid cells because they can be so easily used in terrorist acts. Not only for detonators, but as disposable comm. I would suspect they were planning on smuggling them out of the country.
 
Smince: if the men in question were terrorists planning to smuggle those phones to Europe, they're idiots and must be encouraged: Europe doesn't use the same celphone standard as the States! The phones won't work there.
 
My bad. I was just speculating. I do remember reading that pre-paids were being heavily regulated in other countries, though.
 
A detail that has been overlooked here is that these guys were separating the cell phones out of the boxes and putting the phones in one box, the chargers in another, and the rest of the stuff in another.

That seems like a lot of work to make $5 per phone.
Wouldn't they have had an easier time selling them "NIB" rather than as loose parts?

Keep an eye on the follow up to this one.

Carter
 
Michigan seems a lonnng way to go from Texas to get cell phones. Apparently they can't buy these in a Wal*Mart in Oklahoma, Alabama, Colorado, or New Mexico?

Another thing that doesn't make sense -- how much are the cell phones? Supposing they're dirt cheap (e.g. $29.99) where did they get the seed money to buy the phones in the first place? Wouldn't it have been better to spend the $29,999 on the brother's education in the first place? Hmmm.

Previous news reports on the Marietta, Ohio team said they had removed the chips from the phones and it's the chips that can be used to activate a detonator (so I'm told).

One more thing people...
If these guys were caching the detonator components...
Who has the explosives and where are they now?
 
Actually, with a tracfone, you can make 100 free minutes for two different phones as long as you activate one with a referral from the other. That would let you bump up the street price of the tracfone a bit, since it would be pre activated and have something like 130 minutes on it from the getgo.

Then you get into things like giving the referrals only to a smaller percentage of phones so they keep getting 100 minutes over and over until they have something like five thousand per phone out of 100 phones, and sell those for a few hundred dollars to a guy who only has cash and no credit...

Shady, but with the way tracfones can be when it comes to getting free minutes, doable.

Tracfone sucks by the way, don't use it ever.

I can't wait for the "oh no turrists" crowd decides that the way to safeguard us is to prevent law abiding citizens from buying prepaid phones without any hassle. Yeah, that works real well in drugstores to prevent meth being made. That sure stopped the meth problem alright.
 
I can't imagine why these guys would have purchased 1000 cell phones for retail price from Wal-Marts if the purpose was to make a profit in resales. There would be all sorts of ways to buy them via the internet, save $ in the process by buying wholesale and in bulk. The notion they were making $5 each or whatever is lame when they more easily could have been making double or triple that amount and not having paid sales tax too boot.

I don't know that anything with the cell phones is illegal specifically, but it would make sense of the phones were part of a bigger plan for something bad. For example, you can buy a few cell phones from each Wal Mart with cash, paying retail and sales tax, and nobody know the difference. Buying 1000 phones from a vendor requires payment, shipping information, etc. which can then be used to track to the buyer.

No, they don't need 1000 phones to bomb one bridge, but they could use 1000 phones to help bomb many bridges.
 
Double Naught Spy,

These "terrorists" had 1000 phones, and some other "terrorists" caught recently had 600 phones. Exactly how many bridges do you suppose these people were planning to blow up?

It seems plausible to me that this is a misunderstood case of budding capitalists taking advantage of differences in local cell phone markets.

Roberta X said:
Europe doesn't use the same celphone standard as the States! The phones won't work there.
Click to expand...
The U.S. has both GSM (Cingular, T-Mobile) and CDMA (Sprint, Verizon, Nextel).
Western Europe has GSM only.
The U.S. tends to use 850MHz and 1900MHz for GSM.
Europe tends to use 900MHZ and 1800MHz for GSM.

Compatibility depends on having a GSM phone that supports the right frequencies, and having the phone unlocked so it will work with other networks' SIM cards. GSM is GSM. It's an open standard, so there's no fundamental difference between GSM in the Americas and GSM elsewhere.

CDMA is the bastard child of cell phone technology outside of the Americas. There is currently no CDMA service anywhere in western Europe. Since GSM has decent coverage in most urban areas in the Americas, and superior coverage most everywhere else, it makes sense as a one-phone solution for world travelers. The ability to swap out SIM cards to quickly change service plans is a major advantage, too.
 
Too little information. The media may not have been able to get more.
I end up not knowing if conclusions were reached without any crime being committed, if the authorities acted before they had enough information to convict of anything, or if they are merely small time hustlers of some sort.
I understand why not all information would be released, but comfounding on this end.
 
Trac-fones are only $19.95 at Wal-marts and drug stores here in Alabama. As for them "sucking", I've used one for about a year (not a terrorist) and it works better than my wife's Verizon(can you hear me now?).

But it does say in my manual that they can't be used outside the US, except for P.R. and the Virgin Islands.
 
It's the way the $ adds up, for a phone to give to my mom for when she goes on a trip so she can call from the side of the road, they're dandy. If you plan on using more than an hour or two a month, a real plan is better.

It works out to pricey even with the double minute plans.
 
Sounds like the three men are in a situation that bears investigating if the story they are telling is true, then they should be let go, but I would keep a very close eye on them, and the person, or people, the phones are sold to.

I would also totally disregard the Race, ethnic Profiling accuation as this alone will get a lot of people killed, we simply cannot ignore the fact that Arab looking men between the age of 17 and 40 have been the Perps in too many cases of Terrorist Bombings. To ignore this would be the same thing as giving a pass to the terrorist.
 
Yeah, because there aren't any terrorists with blonde hair and blue eyes, and because they are incapable of recruiting caucasians.
 
From what I hear, these phones (or at least parts of them), are being sold to make a profit for these young entrepreneurs. However, the money would be going to finance terrorists organizations. The main thing they seem to want though is the cell phone circuit boards. Supported or not in Europe, they are still going to be used as detonation devices for IEDs in Iraq. A cell phone is nothing more than a fairly short range radio device. They are very commonly used to kill our troops.
These young muslims deserve very close scrutiny indeed.
 
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