4 arrested in alleged plot to bomb NY Jewish synagogues

According to a report available on New York Daily News website, the men also wanted to use surface-to-air missiles to shoot down U.S. military planes near Stewart Air National Guard Base. The four men were arrested after a year long investigation that began when an informant connected to a mosque in Newburg, a city along the Hudson River, said some militants wanted to buy explosives, says the report. The men were arrested as they planted fake bombs in front of the Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, one of the five boroughs in New York City, and under cars parked in front of the synagogue. They also allegedly planned to blow up a second synagogue, the Riverdale Jewish Center at West 237th Street and Independence Avenue. All four men were reportedly born in the United States. The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City and also the third-most-densely-populated county in the United States. Wikipedia cites Jewish organizations as saying that 592,185 Jews lived in the Bronx in 1937, about 43.9 percent of the borough's population at the time, while in 2002, only about 45,000did. However, many synagogues still stand in the Bronx, but most have been converted to other uses; Kazinform cites Xinhua. See news.xinhuanet.com for full version.