The arrest in Yemen of a New Jersey man accused of joining al-Qaida is the latest in an alarming string of cases involving radicalized American Muslims.
Yemeni authorities said this week that the American, Sharif Mobley, 26, who had worked for six years as a laborer at nuclear plants in New Jersey, had been arrested last week in Sana, the Yemeni capital, in a sweep of militants tied to the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida and the Somali Al Shabab movement.
Taken to a hospital for medical treatment, Mobley allegedly grabbed a security guard's gun and shot two guards, one of them fatally, before being subdued, Yemeni officials said.
U.S. and Yemeni officials said Mobley, like the Nigerian man accused of attempting to bomb a jetliner headed to Detroit on Christmas Day, had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric whose radical sermons have been found on the computers of more than a dozen terror suspects in the West. Awlaki, now in hiding in Yemen, had also exchanged e-mail messages with Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November.
