THE TELEGRAPH: The United States is facing what has been described as its "most serious instance of domestic terrorism" to date, the FBI has warned.
Officials say a second generation of Somali immigrants is becoming increasingly radicalised and could pose a growing threat to security.
The warnings come amid the revelation that 20 young Somali American men who returned to their war-torn homeland have been radicalised by a group linked to al-Qaeda.
The FBI is urgently examining links between the youths, who are all American citizens, and al-Shabaab, an Islamist group fighting in the country's long-running conflict.
Investigators are concentrating on two mosques, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Centre in Minneapolis and the Dawah Institute in the neighbouring city of St Paul, where parents and guardians of the departed youths said their sons attended classes.
But the probe has now spread to Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Maine.
US law enforcement agencies are concerned young militants could return to the US to plot terror attacks, following a similar path to the British Pakistanis behind the London bombings in July 7, 2005 who made multiple visits to radical mosques in Pakistan.
The authorities began looking into the radicalisation of Somali youths after 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed became the first known American suicide bomber in late October.
The Minneapolis student blew himself up in one of five co-ordinated bombings in northern Somalia orchestrated by al-Shabaab, whose former leader reportedly trained at terror camps in Afghanistan before being killed in an American air strike in May, 2008. US Facing Home-grown Islamic Terror Threat >>> By Alex Spillius in Washington | Friday, March 13, 2009
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