Muslim Plot to Bomb Jewish Facilities, Attack US Planes

...The men had planned to detonate a car with plastic explosives outside a temple in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale and to shoot military planes at the New York Air National Guard base at Stewart Airport in Newburgh with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles, authorities said...

In their efforts to acquire weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.

The investigation had been under way for about a year.

In June 2008, the informant met one of the men, James Cromitie, in Newburgh and Cromitie complained that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset about the war there and that many Muslim people were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by US military forces, officials said.

Cromitie also expressed an interest in doing "something to America," they said in the complaint.

In October 2008, the informant began meeting with the defendants at a Newburgh house equipped with concealed video and audio equipment, the complaint said.

Beginning in April 2009, the four men selected the synagogue and the community center they intended to hit, it said. They also conducted surveillance of military planes at the Air National Guard Base, it said.

Rep. Peter King, the senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, was briefed on the case following the arrests.

"This was a long, well-planned investigation, and it shows how real the threat is from homegrown terrorists," said King, of New York.