Arrest catches small Ore. town by surprise

Dean Lawrence used to think it was a joke when he heard all the talk about terrorists thinking about training on a sheep ranch outside his tiny hometown of Bly, Ore.

He was rethinking things Thursday after the arrest of a Muslim cleric in London on charges of trying to establish a terrorist training camp near Bly, a logging and ranching town in the sagebrush-dotted high desert of southern Oregon.

"A small town like this - I read in the paper one time there was 15 people came down to look" at the ranch, Lawrence said Thursday at the gas station he owns in Bly.

The unincorporated town of a few hundred people sits 50 miles east of Klamath Falls, the closest place to find a barber or doctor. The high school closed in 1968, and the town has been struggling to survive since a lumber mill shut down in the late 1980s.

The cleric, Abu Hamza Al-Masri, was arrested in London on Thursday on a U.S. indictment alleging he tried to start the training camp and provided aid to al-Qaida.

Two people connected to a mosque in Seattle, Semi Osman and James Ujaama, were charged in 2002 with trying to start a training camp for Masri, but the charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas on lesser charges.

Authorities have said Ujaama sent Masri a fax proposing a camp outside Bly, and Masri sent two representatives to evaluate the site. The two were reportedly disappointed that the property had no barracks for trainees, and the camp was never developed.

The Klamath County Sheriff's Department got a tip from Interpol about the ranch in 1999 and sent some deputies to keep an eye on it, but they did not notice much beyond a dozen people taking target practice, said Sheriff Tim Evinger.

The shooting was not enough to catch the notice of neighbor Don Wessel, a retired logger who himself is used to taking shots at gophers on his ranch. He saw the news about Masri's arrest on TV.

"There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office," Wessel said.

Oregon had a brush with terrorism in 2002, when seven Portland-area Muslims, most of them American-born, were charged with plotting to join the Taliban to fight in Afghanistan.

Only one, accused ringleader Habis Abdu al Saoub, made it to the battlefield, where he was killed by U.S. forces last year. The others met with visa and money troubles and returned without firing a shot. They pleaded guilty to various charges and are serving three to 18 years in prison.

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