Americans radicalised by al Qaeda a big concern: FBI boss

With more American citizens like Faisal Shahzad getting radicalised in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, the FBI is working on a plan to track US residents who travel overseas, embrace al Qaeda ideology and return to carry out terror attacks.
"We are focused on trying to figure out what our people are up to - who should be spoken to, who should be followed, who should be charged," FBI Director James Comey said.
Comey said US law enforcement officials were increasingly concerned about efforts to recruit and radicalise American citizens by drawing them to the restive region and sending them back to this country to carry out terrorist attacks.

"It's something we are intensely focused on," Comey was quoted as saying by the Los Angeles Times.
Law enforcement officials say they have been tracing other US residents traveling abroad, specifically Somali Americans from Minnesota who have gone to fight in that country.
They are also watching several individuals identified soon after the 9/11 attacks, such as half a dozen men from the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, New York, who trained at an Al Qaeda facility in Afghanistan.

Comey said these suspects were the most difficult to identify and stop.
Although the FBI previously had "great success" against al Qaeda in the group's traditional Afghanistan-Pakistan region, he said, "in the ungoverned or poorly governed spaces in Africa and around the Middle East, we see a resurgence of al Qaeda affiliates."

Two cases of radicalised Americans surfaced last year.
Nicole Lynn Mansfield, a 33-year-old nurse from Michigan, died while fighting alongside anti-government militants in northern Syria. She was among three killed in May after she reportedly tossed a grenade at Syrian soldiers.
The other radicalised American is Eric Harroun, a 31- year-old former US Army private from Tucson, who pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to violate arms-control laws after fighting in Syria alongside al Qaeda terrorists.
Two others in recent years were radicalised in Pakistan, then returned to the US and came dangerously close to carrying out bombings in New York, the report noted.

Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan American, schemed to blow up the subway with backpack bombs, and Faisal Shahzad, an American born in Pakistan, attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square.
Zazi, 28, was arrested in 2009 and admitted he was "recruited" by Pakistani militants to hit the crowded transit system with a series of suicide bombs. He pleaded guilty and was facing life in prison, but his sentence was postponed and he was later reportedly moved to a secret location.
Shahzad, 34, was arrested in 2010 after trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. He, too, pleaded guilty and admitted he had received bomb-making training in Pakistan. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole.