Three men indicted on charges of planning attacks against military

CLEVELAND -- Three Muslim men from the Middle East have been charged with plotting terrorist attacks against U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq and other countries.

One of the men, a citizen of both the U.S. and Jordan, also was accused of threatening to kill or injure President Bush, according to an indictment released Tuesday.

All three had lived in Toledo within the past year and were arrested over the weekend -- two of them in Toledo, the third in Jordan, authorities said.

An unidentified person with a military background helped the U.S. government foil the plot by working with the suspects while secretly gathering evidence, according to the indictment.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales also did not exclude the use of warrantless wiretapping in the investigation, but said prosecutors were careful not to jeopardize the case.

"This case stands as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance in the war on terrorism," he said at a news conference in Washington.

One of the men's attorneys said Tuesday that the government was overzealous in bringing the charges.

"It doesn't help that he's Jordanian," attorney Steve Hartman said of his client. "I think he's caught up in the Justice Department's vigorous work."

The three pleaded not guilty in federal courts in Cleveland and Toledo. The most serious charges could bring life in prison.

Gonzales and other officials refused to say whether an attack was imminent. FBI agents monitored the defendants for about a year and a half, assistant U.S. attorney Craig Morford said at a news conference in Cleveland.

"What we can tell you is, from the indictment, it's very clear that their activities and their intentions were to reach beyond our border and were to kill and maim persons overseas," Morford said.

Two of the men discussed plans to practice setting off explosives on the Fourth of July in 2005 so that the bombs would not be noticed, the indictment alleges. It was not clear whether the men went through with those plans.

The indictment says the group also traveled together to a shooting range to practice and studied how to make explosives. It alleges that at least one of the men researched and tried to obtain government grants and private funding for the training.

Mohammad Zaki Amawi, a citizen of both the U.S. and Jordan, is accused of threatening in conversations to kill or injure Bush. The 26-year-old also is charged with distributing information about making and using bombs.

The others are Marwan Othman El-Hindi, 42, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan; and Wassim I. Mazloum, 24, who came to the United States from Lebanon in 2000.

El-Hindi is accused of trying to get the U.S. citizen with a military background to travel with him in 2004 to the Middle East as part of a plot to establish a terrorism training center. The indictment identifies the military person only as "the trainer."

Mazloum, who said he is an engineering major at the University of Toledo, operated a car business in Toledo with his brother. The indictment accuses him of offering to use his dealership as a cover for traveling to and from Iraq so that he could learn how to build small explosives using household materials.

All three men are charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure people or damage property in a foreign country. They were also charged with conspiracy to kill Americans and harboring or concealing terrorists.

Amawi was assigned a public defender. Mazloum's attorney, Chuck Sallah, said he knew very little about his client or the charges.

Earlier this week, the U.S. government ordered a freeze on the assets of KindHearts, a Toledo-based group suspected of funneling money to the militant organization Hamas. Law enforcement officials, speaking of condition of anonymity, said the arrests of the three men spurred the decision to freeze KindHearts' assets.

"Some aspects of them do overlap," an official said.

KindHearts has denied any terrorist connections and has said it is a humanitarian organization.

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Associated Press Writers John Seewer in Toledo and Mark Sherman in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.