ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities, authorities said Saturday.
The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington, D.C., area, were picked up in Pakistan earlier this month in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to the South Asian country to join militant groups.
Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory allegations about the men’s intentions, while U.S. officials have been far more cautious, though they, too, are looking at charging the men.
A Pakistani government official alleged Saturday that the men had established contact with Taliban commanders and planned to attack sites in Pakistan.
Earlier, however, local police accused the men of intending to fight in Afghanistan after meeting militant leaders.
The men had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that houses nuclear power facilities, a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province. He stressed that the men were not carrying a specific map of any nuclear power plant, but rather the whole of Chashma Barrage.
The detained men also had exchanged e-mails about the area, Islam said.
“We are also working toretrieve some of the deleted material in their computers,” he said.
Pakistan has a nuclear weapons arsenal, but it also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.
Pakistani police plan to recommend that courts charge the five men with collecting and attempting to collect material to carry out terrorist activities in Pakistan, police official Nazir Ahmad told The Associated Press.
The punishments for those charges range from seven years to life in prison, he said.
Officials in both countries have said they expect the men eventually will be deported back to the United States, but charging the men in Pakistan could delay that process.
The men had established contact with Taliban commanders, Punjab province Law Minister Rana Sanaullah said in an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday.
They had planned to meet Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and his deputy Qari Hussain in Pakistan’s tribal regions before attacking sites inside Pakistan, he said.
The nuclear power plant “might have been” one of the targets, Sanaullah alleged.
Police, meanwhile, have alleged the men intended to head first to Pakistan’s tribal regions before joining the militant movement in Afghanistan. The detainees are accused of using the Facebook and YouTube Web sites to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan.
The FBI, whose agentshave been granted some access to the men, is looking into what potential charges they could face in the United States. Possibilities include conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.
The U.S. Embassy has declined to comment on the potential charges and would not say what efforts Washington was making to bring the men back.
The five were arrested in Sargodha earlier this month, but are being held in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.
Pakistan officials have said those detained included two Pakistani Americans, two Ethiopian Americans and an Egyptian American named Ramy Zamzam, a dental student at Howard University in Washington. The others were identified as Waqar Hussain, Aman Yamar, Ahmad Abdul Minni and Umer Farooq. Pakistani officials have given various spellings of their names.
Information for this article was contributed from Lahore by Babar Dogar of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 11 on 12/27/2009