The man, Alexei Saab, 42, of Morristown, was charged with various terrorism-related crimes in a nine-count indictment unsealed in Manhattan. A U.S. citizen since 2008, he was also charged with participating in a sham marriage to help an unnamed co-conspirator obtain citizenship.
In announcing the indictment, Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said that despite Saab’s citizenship status, “his true allegiance was to Hezbollah.”
Saab, who was arrested in July, is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, according to federal prison records. An arraignment had not yet been scheduled, and he has not entered a plea. His lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Saab joined Hezbollah — a political movement based in Lebanon, supported by Iran and considered a terrorist group by the United States — in 1996 when he was recruited by a fellow student at the University of Lebanon, according to the indictment.
His early activities with the group involved observing and reporting on movements by Israeli and Southern Lebanese Army troops in Lebanon, the indictment said.
Three years later, the indictment said, he began firearms training with the group and then shifted to the Islamic Jihad Organization, a Hezbollah unit responsible for external operations. There, he received “extensive training” in, among other things, how to build and detonate bombs and other explosive devices, according to the indictment.
Saab, who is also known as Ali Hassan Saab, entered the United States legally in 2000 with a Lebanese passport and applied for citizenship five years later, the indictment said. One of the counts he now faces involves his false declaration at the time that he had never been a member of, or associated with, “a terrorist organization.”
Saab became a U.S. citizen in 2008, according to the indictment, which noted that he had begun gathering intelligence on potential attack targets in New York and elsewhere five years earlier.
The dozens of “hot spots” he focused on included the United Nations headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the New York Stock Exchange and local airports, bridges and tunnels, the indictment said.
Saab’s goal, according to the indictment, was to determine the “structural weaknesses of the locations he surveilled to determine how a future attack could cause the most destruction.”
He “understood that the information he provided” would be used “to calculate the size of a bomb needed to target a particular structure and the ideal location in which to place the explosive devices to maximize damage.”
A former Islamic Jihad Organization member cited in the indictment as a cooperating witness said Saab had told him that as part of his mission, “he would often take photographs that had a ‘dual purpose,’ both as a tourist interested in certain landmarks and to provide the photographs and information back” to his handlers.
The FBI recovered photographs of some prominent New York sites from Saab’s electronic devices, citing them as evidence of his surveillance activities, prosecutors said.
The top count in the indictment, providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
This article originally appeared in
.