America: To their neighbours in central New Jersey, the Tatar family were the embodiment of an American immigrant success story and their pizza restaurant, Super Mario's, was a popular haunt for soldiers and their families at Fort Dix military base, writes Denis Staunton.
Muslim Tatar moved to the US from Turkey 15 years ago and, when his son Serdar was just eight years old and the family became legal, permanent residents.
On Wednesday night, however, somebody kicked in the door of Super Mario's, shouting racial slurs, and by yesterday the avalanche of nasty phone messages became so great that the Tatars were preparing to close down the restaurant.
The Tatars' world fell apart last Monday night when Serdar (23) was arrested with five others and charged with plotting to kill US soldiers at Fort Dix. Yesterday, a judge refused the six defendants bail and they were returned to a federal detention centre in Philadelphia. Although three of the six are illegal immigrants, all the defendants, who are in their 20s, have spent most of their lives in the US, a fact that has triggered a debate about the threat of "home-grown terrorists".
Although the attacks of September 11th, 2001, were planned outside the US and implemented by foreign nationals who had recently arrived in the country, subsequent bombings in London and Madrid were executed by young Muslims who were apparently fully integrated into British and Spanish society.
The six defendants, five of whom could face life in prison, have lived in and around Philadelphia for years, worshipped at moderate mosques and worked at blue-collar jobs installing roofs, driving a cab, delivering pizzas and baking bread. Four are ethnic Albanians born in former Yugoslavia, one is from Jordan and one, Tatar, is from Turkey.
According to the indictment, the six defendants met regularly to discuss an attack on Fort Dix, which Serdar Tatar knew well from the pizza deliveries he had regularly made to the base. They took part in firearms training and sought to acquire fully automatic machine guns with a view to killing as many US service personnel as possible.
"Their goal was to kill US soldiers, and there were thousands of American soldiers right around the corner," prosecutor Christopher Christie said.
The FBI had been spying on the six for 15 months, alerted by a sales assistant at an electronics shop that one of the defendants, 22-year-old Mohammad Ibrahim Shnewer, tried to get a home video expressing violent, Islamic fundamentalist sentiments, transferred to DVD.
A paid informant infiltrated the group and recorded conversations over the following year, travelling with the defendants to a firearms training session and discussing their violent plans. Another paid informant gathered further, incriminating evidence and much of the prosecution's case is based on the evidence of these two informants.
Shnewer's lawyer has accused the FBI of entrapment and the indictment suggests that one of the informants, who claimed to have a military background in Egypt, came to be seen as the group's leader. "I am at your services," Shnewer told the informant, who told the alleged plotters that he could procure machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for the attack on Fort Dix.
At one stage, Tatar went to local police, complaining that he was being put under pressure to steal a map of Fort Dix for the group, although he later denied knowledge of the plot and, according to the indictment, did indeed deliver a map of the base. Other defendants also expressed misgivings about the plan, with one suggesting that they should not do anything without the authority of a fatwa from a Muslim cleric.
Although the recorded conversations suggest that the defendants had come to embrace a radical, Islamist outlook, defence lawyers will argue that they would never have acted on their views without the prodding of the FBI informant.
Earlier scares about home-grown terrorists, including an alleged plot to blow up the Sears tower in Chicago, have proved to be based on little more than idle chat that never evolved into concrete plans.
Since September 11th, 2001, however, US juries have been unsympathetic to claims of entrapment, particularly if defendants have expressed the wish to kill Americans.