Two Islamic girls arrested for immigration violations and possible terrorist connections

New York Post:

Two teenage New York girls are in prison as illegal aliens after stumbling into a federal probe of recruiters trying to sign up homicide bombers, The Post has learned.

The unidentified 16-year-old Muslim girls — who reportedly are being held in a Pennsylvania detention center — were taken into custody last month on immigration charges.

The arrests took place after authorities decided it would be better to lock up the girls than wait and see if they decided to become terrorists willing to die for a cause, law-enforcement sources said.

The girls — said to be immigrants from Bangladesh and Guinea — had been placed under surveillance for several weeks after first becoming known to investigators.

The arrests came after the parents of the girl from Bangladesh — who lives in Queens — reported she had run away, sources said.

The report led investigators to look more closely at both girls to try to determine whether they were in the country illegally and could thus be arrested.

Both had visited an unidentified mosque where anti-American and extreme fundamentalist rhetoric had been spewed.

And in a notebook belonging to one of the girls, she discussed the issue of suicide, sources said.

"An ancillary effect of intervening early is you don't know what would have happened," a source familiar with the case said.

Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which has custody of the girls — would say only that "they've been arrested on immigration violations" and that "because they're minors, we can't say anything else."

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