DEREK MCGINTY: Five Muslim men from the Washington area, now under arrest in Pakistan. Authorities captured the group today in a house linked to extremists.
ANITA BRIKMAN: The arrest comes more than a week after relatives frantically reported them missing; and new tonight, a disturbing farewell video has been recovered at one of their homes. It shows scenes of war and causalities and it also described how Muslims must be defended.
MCGINTY: The men, aged 19-25, are said to be second generation immigrants which raises questions about an emerging trend that experts label "homegrown terrorism." Nine News Now's Brittany Morehouse has the story.
BRITTANY MOREHOUSE: One of them is a Howard University dental student, Ramy Zamzam. Four more are young Muslim men who live in our region and are of Pakistani, Egyptian, and Yemeni descent. And all five are suspected to have been on their way to a Jihad training camp. It's what experts call signs of a classic case.
STEVE EMERSON: We're becoming more Europeanized every day insofar as we are seeing this spread of Jihadism among second generation Muslims.
MOREHOUSE: Steve Emerson is head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. He says extremist groups are targeting young people in the States, whose families are often not sympathetic to the cause.
EMERSON: It devastates the parents that want the best things in America that's available to them for their own children and yet their children reject it.
MOREHOUSE: National Security expert Neal Livingstone says homegrown terrorism is a serious threat that many Americans don't even realize.
NEAL LIVINGSTONE: We may have American citizens, people studying here, that look like ordinary Americans and they may be in effect, be a fifth column. They may be going abroad to train and then coming back here to carry out attacks.
MOREHOUSE: The five Americans detained were picked up at the home of a suspected terrorist.
LIVINGSTONE: If it's clear that they've gone there to join the Taliban, the government there is probably going to deal with them very harshly because those are the same people that are killing so many innocent Pakistanis today and destabilizing the government.
MOREHOUSE: On the other hand, Emerson says if they are linked to extremists they should be turned over to American authorities. Brittany Morehouse, Nine News Nine and WUSA9.com.
MCGINTY: And Nine News Now has also confirmed the five men have ties to the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. That is the very same mosque linked to Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. We tried numerous times to contact a mosque representative, our phone calls were not returned.