Other attack plots foiled in recent years

Several other plots or attempts to attack sites in this country have been uncovered in recent years. Here are a few of them:

December 2010: A 21-year-old U.S. citizen, who used the name Muhammad Hussain after converting to Islam, was accused of attempting to blow up the Armed Forces Career Center near Baltimore. The explosive device he used was a fake, supplied to him by undercover FBI agents.

November 2010: Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, of Corvallis, Ore., was arrested after an FBI sting operation in a plot to set off a bomb at the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland's Pioneer Square.

October 2010: Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old Virginia man originally from Pakistan, was charged in a plot to coordinate a series of bombings in Washington, D.C., subway stations. Ahmed believed he was working with al-Qaida operatives to plan the attacks, but the men were actually undercover FBI agents.

May 2010: A Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, Faisal Shahzad, 30, was arrested for his botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York's Times Square. He was arrested attempting to flee the country on a Dubai-bound airplane about to take off from Kennedy Airport.

September 2009: Hosam Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian man, was arrested after an FBI sting in which he attempted to detonate a car bomb that he parked beneath a 60-story Dallas skyscraper. The bomb was a fake supplied by FBI agents.

September 2009: Michael Finton, 30, a former fry cook from Illinois who converted to Islam while in prison, attempted to destroy the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, Ill. Finton used a van he thought was packed with explosives; the van had been supplied to him by undercover FBI agents.

Compiled by Seattle Times news researcher Gene Balk