Two weeks after a Sudbury man was arrested in an alleged terror plot to kill Americans in the US and overseas, federal authorities announced today an indictment of him and a former Mansfield man they say fled to Syria.

Tarek Mehanna, 27, of Sudbury, and Ahmad Abousamra, 28, who last lived in Mansfield, were charged in a 10-count indictment with providing and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, and other charges.

Federal prosecutors in Boston also released two undated photographs of a Mehanna smiling at Ground Zero in New York City with friends, as well as excerpts of conversations he allegedly had with friends online in which he expressd his admiration for Al Qaeda, the 19 hijackers who participated in the 9/11 attacks, and Osama bin Laden.

"I look to him ... as being my real father, in a sense," he allegedly wrote in an online chat on April 28, 2006.

Home-grown terrorists?

Two weeks ago, a Sudbury resident, Tarek Mehanna was arrested on terrorism charges. According to the FBI, he and his friends had sought terrorist training in places like Pakistan, and together they plotted to machine gun random shoppers at a local shopping mall here in New England.

The images these reports evoke (blood, panic, screams at a mall near you) bring to mind scenes from last year's Mumbai massacre in India where other young men, trained and sent by the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group, gunned down innocents with automatic weapons in public places.

Apart from the method of murder, and the request for Pakistani training, could there possibly be any other connection between an arrest in Sudbury and the massacre in Mumbai? Why would a seemingly successful American teenager seek terrorist training in Pakistan?

On paper, Tarek Mehanna seems an American success story. Born here to the family of an Egyptian immigrant chemistry professor, he was raised in the Boston suburbs and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.

A practicing Muslim, Mehanna taught science and religion at Alhuda Academy, which adjoins the Worcester Islamic Center. But it was at the Islamic Center of New England in Sharon, according to The Boston Globe, that Mehanna met Ahmad Abousamra, with whom the FBI alleges he plotted the terrorist attack.

Abousamara, too, seemed to be headed for an American middle class life. He attended Stoughton and Xaverian Brothers high schools and he was on the dean's list at Northeastern University. His father, an immigrant from Syria, was a prominent doctor at Mass General.

But somewhere along the way, Abousamra appears to have become a radical. According to the affidavit filed by FBI, he believed that his religion justified killing American shoppers "because they were Kuffar" (non-believers). According to the FBI, Abousamara sought terrorism training in Pakistan with Lashkar-e-Taiba, though he was rejected because he was an Arab and not Pakistani. Shortly after the FBI first questioned him, Abousamara fled to Syria.

His father, Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was a prominent leader in the Muslim community. In 1994, he joined the Islamic Center of New England, becoming its president in 1998. The older Abousamra's passion lay with educating the center's youth. He established two schools there: the Islamic Academy of New England and Al Noor Academy.

Shortly after he became the center's president, he hired Hafiz Mohammed Masood, then a dropout from Boston University's economics program. Masood served as the Imam at the center and taught at its schools. Masood was eventually arrested and deported for immigration fraud, at which point it was revealed that he was the brother of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e- Taibah. After the Mumbai attacks, the Times of India cited its sources as saying that Masood, together with his Worcester-based brother Hafiz Mohammad Hamid (who was also deported for immigration fraud) were here to live "as imams and preach and raise funds for jihad."

(There is an interesting side story about Masood: He came to the aid of the Sharon Jewish community and helped them wash off a swastika from their synagogue, thereby winning the hearts of many local Jews who defend him to this day.)

As for Abdul-Badi Abousamra, he became the vice president of the Muslim American Society's Boston branch, which runs the largest Islamic center in the northeast at its Roxbury location. The society is controversial: according to federal prosecutors, it is the American face of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest radical Islamic organization in existence and the origin of groups like Al Qaeda and Hamas. Abousamra left for Detroit in early 2007, shortly after his son was interviewed by the FBI.

We do not know enough to fully understand the web of relationships among entities in the Middle East, in Pakistan, some of the newly established American Islamic institutions and the recent FBI arrests. The facts seem to be calling for more questions.

What happened to these young men? Is the historically moderate Boston Muslim community being radicalized? What is being taught in Islamic schools and centers? Who is funding these efforts?

Stay tuned.

Charles Jacobs is president and Ilya Feoktistov is research director of the Americans for Peace and Tolerance.