Lackawanna Six

The Buffalo Six (also known as Lackawanna Six, Lackawanna Cell, or Buffalo Cell) is a group of six Yemeni-Americans who were convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda. The six are American citizens by birth. They traveled to Afghanistan in spring 2001, before the September 11, 2001 attacks, while the country was still ruled by the Taliban, which was then giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, who in turn used it as a base for al-Qaeda training.

In the late summer of 2002, one of the members, Muktar al-Bakri, sent an e-mail in which he described an upcoming wedding and another in which he mentioned a “big meal”. In the past the word “wedding” had been used as a code for a terrorist attack and “big meal” as code for an explosive.. The Bush administration in 2002 considered sending U.S. troops into a Buffalo, N.Y

suburb to arrest a group of terror suspects in what would have been a nearly unprecedented use of military power, The New York Times reported. Vice President Dick Cheney and several other Bush advisers at the time strongly urged that the military be used to apprehend men who were suspected of plotting with al Qaida, who later became known as the Lackawanna Six, the Times reported on its Web site Friday night. It cited former administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.