They say Batiste dreamed of bringing down the 110-story Sears Tower and bombing FBI offices in Miami and elsewhere as the first salvo in a broad insurrection against the government, and eagerly welcomed help from al-Qaida to accomplish his goal.

The details emerging yesterday about the seven accused wanna-be jihadists did not make up a picture of your standard Islamic terrorists.

Seven men arrested in the US for planning to blow up America's tallest building and FBI offices were not Muslims and not linked to the US Islamic community, Islamic leaders insisted yesterday.

Seven men were charged yesterday with waging war on the United States after they were arrested and accused of plotting to blow up America's tallest building.

The father of the former Chicagoan accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower remembers his son, Narseal Batiste, coming under the spell of a man who wore a black robe and walked with a black staff.

The ringleader of the seven men accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago was a “Moses-like figure” who carried a crooked cane and wore a cape as he sought to recruit followers to a religious cult called the Seas of David.

America was warned yesterday that it faced a new “home-grown terrorist� threat after the FBI arrested seven men accused of conspiring with al-Qaeda and plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The alleged ringleader of a terrorist cell that planned to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago was an adherent of an obscure black Islamist sect that was first investigated by America's Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s, relatives said yesterday.