The Ocean and Monmouth area is my turf. I really take personal offense to terrorists wanting to shoot up the place.
The case began to take shape in January 2006, when an employee of a store told the FBI someone had brought a "disturbing" video to be duplicated, Christie said.
The video "depicted 10 young men who appeared to be in their early 20s shooting assault weapons at a firing range in a militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic 'Allah Akbar,' " (Arabic for "God is Great"), according to an FBI affidavit filed with the criminal complaints.
Two paid informants infiltrated the group, one in March 2006 and the other in July. Both of them "consensually recorded" meetings and conversations, according to the affidavit, filed by Special Agent John J. Ryan.
One quote from the alleged recordings was defendant Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer saying, "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers. ... This is exactly what we are looking for. You hit four, five or six Humvees and light the whole place [up] and retreat completely without any losses."
The men are believed to have been "inspired" by international terrorist groups, but not directly linked to a specific organization, he said.
He said defendant Shain Duka was heard on tape saying, "We can do a lot of damage with seven people. We can do big things."
A law enforcement source told CNN the group played paintball and test fired weapons as part of their training.
The men had surveyed a number of bases but settled on Fort Dix because one of the defendants said he knew the base "like the back of his hand" because he had delivered pizza there, Christie said.
The six -- three of them brothers -- were arrested Monday night "as two of the defendants were meeting a confidential government witness to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns, and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006," according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said the three brothers involved, all with the last name Duka, were born in the former Yugoslavia and are illegally residing in the United States. It identified them as Eljvir, 23, Shain, 26, and Dritan, 28, and said the three operate businesses known as Qadr Inc., Colonial Roofing and National Roofing.
The other three men charged are Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan who is employed as a taxicab driver in Philadelphia; Serdar Tatar, 23, of Philadelphia, born in Turkey, whose last known employment was at a 7-Eleven; and Agron Abdullahu, 24, of Buena Vista Township, born in the former Yugoslavia and employed at a Shop-Rite Supermarket.
