One of the Aurora men arrested for allegedly lying to federal officials investigating a cross-country bombing plot will be released from jail but monitored electronically, while the other will have to wait until at least Thursday to learn whether he can go free on bond.
Najibullah Zazi, 24, and his father, 53-year-old Mohammed Zazi, appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Craig Shaffer at 1:30 p.m. wearing the same clothes they had on Saturday night, when they were taken into custody.
Shaffer agreed to release Mohammed Zazi on $50,000 bail with electronic monitoring. He set a bail hearing for Najibullah Zazi for 9 a.m. Thursday morning.
Electronic monitoring takes time to set up, so it could be 48 hours before the elder Zazi is released.
The men were arrested Saturday as part of an investigation into what authorities describe as a plot to detonate homemade bombs in the United States.
In court documents, federal agents said Afghanistan-born Najibullah Zazi admitted to al-Qaeda training and had bombmaking notes on his laptop.
They have been held in Denver County Jail since late Saturday, when FBI agents descended on their on East Smoky Hill Road apartment and arrested them on nonterrorism charges of making false statements.
The Zazis had broken off voluntary talks with the FBI after three days of questioning.
A New York imam, Ahmad Wais Afzali, identified as a police informant, also faces charges of making false statements in that state. If convicted, each faces up to eight years in prison.
No evidence has been presented to substantiate the international plot that FBI agents announced in arrest affidavits. David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said authorities have “no specific information regarding the timing, location or target of any planned attack.”
He said the arrests “are part of an ongoing and fast-paced investigation.”
Meanwhile, ABC News reported Sunday that federal investigators are looking at the possibility that eight more people might be involved. Four might have ties to Colorado, the other four to New York.
ABC’s chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, told 7News in Denver that the eight could be part of the same cell but operating in two areas.
Federal authorities based Saturday’s arrests on alleged false statements made in interviews with the FBI and during “legally authorized electronic surveillance.”
Najibullah Zazi, they said, gave a false story about notes on his computer. Mohammed Zazi, according to the affidavits, did not truthfully answer questions about whom he spoke with on a call to New York. And Afzali is alleged to have tipped off the Zazis that federal agents were looking for the younger man.
The affidavits reveal that FBI agents put Najibullah Zazi under surveillance in Colorado sometime after he returned from a nearly five-month visit to Pakistan that started in August 2008.
Zazi’s father and his aunt and uncle have said Zazi went to Pakistan to visit his wife in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border city of Peshawar.
According to an affidavit, during questioning in Denver on Thursday and Friday, Zazi admitted attending courses “at an al-Qaeda training facility in the FATA (tribal) region of Pakistan” and that “he received instruction from al-Qaeda operatives on subjects such as weapons and explosives.”
Federal authorities continued their surveillance as Zazi rented a car on Sept. 9 in Denver and drove to New York, documents show. Zazi and his father have said he went there to deal with a business matter involving a coffee cart he owns.
While he was there, police stopped him on a bridge leading into the city and later, when the vehicle was parked, searched for evidence and had the vehicle towed.
Zazi flew back to Colorado and learned from friends who called him that FBI agents had raided three locations in the New York City borough of Queens.
Federal agents on Sept. 11 intercepted a phone conversation in which Mohammed Zazi at one point asks his son in New York: “What has happened? What have you guys done?” the affidavits say.
Afzali, who apparently had known the Zazis in New York, advises Najibullah Zazi in a later call: “Don’t get involved in Afghanistan garbage, Iraq garbage,” and then tells him their “phone call is being monitored” and asks if there was any “evidence” in his car, the affidavits say.
During the search of the rental car, the affidavits say, authorities found a laptop containing an image of handwritten bomb-making notes. The notes “contain formulations and instructions regarding the manufacture and handling of initiating explosives, main explosives charges, explosives detonators and components of a fusing system.”
An affidavit says the search of a New York apartment where Zazi stayed turned up a black scale and several batteries — and that testing detected Zazi’s fingerprints.
Zazi allegedly told the FBI in Denver “that if the handwritten notes was found on his computer, he must have unintentionally downloaded it as part of a religious book he had downloaded in August.
He states he had immediately deleted the religious book within days of downloading it after realizing that its contents discussed jihad,” the affidavit said.
The arrest document said the handwritten notes were sent from an e-mail account in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2008 to Zazi.
