Once Derwish assembled the Six, he put up thousands of dollars to fund their travel to Pakistan, Personius says, though a law enforcement source says that the money trail is still being investigated. In March 2001, Shafal Mosed, 25, one of the best goalies in Lackawanna High history, visited a travel agent to order airline tickets to Lahore, Pakistan, for himself, Faysal Galab, 27, and Taher; all three later paid with cash -- $1,309.20 apiece.

Taher ran into his uncle, Abdul Noman, the day of their flight, April 28, 2001. "I'm going to study the Islamic religion," he said.

"Allah be with you," Noman replied.

Mohamed Albanna -- the father of Galab's fiancée, Aisha, and the vice president of the local chapter of the American Muslim Council -- says he found out about the trip at the last minute, and he wasn't happy. "Their language barrier wasn't going to be beneficial for them to learn anything religiously," Albanna says. "And I personally wasn't thrilled because my daughter just had a baby and he [Galab] was leaving her with two kids, which is not the right thing to do. Having said that, if they want to make a religious trip, they're entitled to it."

Mosed, Galab, and Taher flew from New York to Lahore. About a week later, they were contacted by an emissary from Derwish who took them to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

On May 12, the other three -- Alwan, al-Bakri, Yahya Goba, 26, plus a seventh man from the neighborhood, Jaber Elbaneh, 36, a nephew of Mohamed Albanna -- flew to Quetta, Pakistan, where they met Derwish. They, too, then traveled to Kandahar.

In both places, missionary Islamist scholars of Tablighi Jamaat lectured them -- about prayers, but also teaching more extremist dogma like the al-Qaida view of Muslim struggles in the Palestinian territories, its stand against Kashmir, and justifications for suicide bombings. They watched a videotape about the bombing of the USS Cole. All six eventually traveled southwest of Kandahar, to the al-Farooq training camp.

Much of the al-Qaida recruitment video shown on cable news channels after 9/11 was filmed at al-Farooq. Terrorists in training fired Kalashnikov rifles at pictures of then-President Clinton, ran obstacle courses, blew things up. "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh arrived at the camp just as the Lackawanna Six were leaving. Months before, two Saudi recruits, Wail al-Shehri and Abdulaziz al-Omeri, trained there before tackling their final task -- propelling American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The Lackawanna Six were there before 9/11. Nonetheless, Alwan had misgivings, he said in a court statement. "After realizing the crazy, radical mentality of the people at the camp," on the fifth day of training he decided he wanted out. Crying, he asked a guard if he could leave but was rebuffed. He couldn't leave without permission; the camp was "out in the wilderness" and he wouldn't "know where to go or how to return to Kandahar or any place else," he said in the statement. He faked an ankle injury. On his 10th day there he was released, riding in a pickup truck to Kandahar, where he stayed in a guest house for two days before taking a minivan to Quetta.

Something else happened in Kandahar, however, which Alwan didn't readily admit.

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Last summer, a member of Lackawanna's Yemeni community wrote to the FBI's Buffalo office expressing concern about the trip the Six had taken the previous year. In July, federal authorities interviewed Mosed and Taher; they acknowledged having studied religion in Pakistan but denied traveling to Afghanistan. But U.S. intelligence agencies began conducting surveillance on them, discovering that Mukhtar al-Bakri was in Bahrain to prepare for his arranged marriage and that he kept in touch with Derwish in Yemen via e-mail. The authorities knew Derwish was a terrorist. Was al-Bakri one, too? They wanted to find out.

"Goodbye," al-Bakri said in a tapped phone call to a friend before his Sept. 10, 2002, wedding. "You won't be hearing from me again."

Concerned by what sounded to authorities like a pre-jihad farewell, intelligence agents began reviewing his file. On July 18 he'd sent an e-mail to a friend in Buffalo:

Subject: The Big Meal

How are you, my beloved? Allah willing, you are fine. I would like to remind you of obeying Allah and keeping him in your heart because the next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to withstand it except those of faith. There are people here who had visions and their visions were explained that this thing will be very strong. No one will be able to bear it.

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