Terrorism Probe Points to Reach Of Web Networks

The men were not exactly experienced operatives; they went to spend the night in a Super 8 Motel in the Virginia suburbs, only to discover it was too expensive.

"Like $79 per night," Ahmed told the FBI.

So they slept in the pickup. The next day, using Ahmed's father's digital video camera, they shot images in Northern Virginia and the District -- the "casing videos," prosecutors said.

They had previously discussed the idea of attacking the Masonic temple in Alexandria. "We had been told they worship the devil or whatever," Ahmed told the FBI. But they never did any planning, he said.

By midday, the men were at the Capitol, when suddenly police swooped in to confront the Australian tourist. Ahmed's heart raced, but he was also thrilled by the action, he recounted. He shot video of a hazmat truck racing by, he recalled.

"That was pretty cool, don't you think?" Ahmed told the FBI.

But for all his boyish enthusiasm, Ahmed acknowledged that his actions could have deadly consequences. Asked whether he knew his video could be used by radicals to plan an attack on the Washington region, Ahmed told the FBI: "You could say that, yeah."

He never explained why the men filmed the fuel storage tanks on Interstate 95, near Lorton. But, he told the FBI, he had talked to Sadequee about attacking an oil installation somewhere in America. Oil is "Muslim property and it's being stolen," Ahmed explained. An attack would "raise the prices so that people over there will get more money," he said.

Three months after his Washington trip, Ahmed went to Pakistan. He told the FBI he had hoped to train in the camps of the Kashmiri group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

But his cousins and some Islamic teachers in Pakistan talked Ahmed out of the idea, telling him he had been brainwashed, he said.

"They, like, put some sense into me," he recounted. Ahmed returned home the next month, August 2005.

But a few weeks later, according to the indictment, he did research on powerful explosives. And over the next few months, the indictment says, Ahmed told two friends he wanted to go back abroad "to train for and engage in violent jihad."

Staff writer Susan Schmidt and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.