Authorities investigating a radical Islamist prison gang linked to an alleged terrorist plot in Southern California said they believe that the group may have only a dozen hard-core followers within the state's correctional system.

But the officials said they want to make sure that dozens of other prisoners and parolees are not aligned with Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh, or JIS, given the FBI's growing concern that disaffected inmates drawn to radical Islam could become a source of terrorist activity across the country.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles last week indicted four men, including a state prisoner in Folsom who is believed to have founded JIS, on charges that they were conspiring over months to attack U.S. military facilities, synagogues and other sites in the area.

The inmate, Kevin Lamar James, 29, of Gardena is serving a 10-year sentence at California State Prison, Sacramento, for a 1996 robbery.

One of his alleged accomplices is Levar Haney Washington, 25, of Los Angeles, a former inmate at the prison. The other two, who have no criminal records, are Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21, of Gardena and Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, of Inglewood. Patterson and Samana met Washington within the last year at a local mosque. All three remain in custody on the federal terrorism charges.

Patterson's parents, Rodney and Abbie Patterson, issued a statement last week in which they stood behind their son and said he "deserves a presumption of innocence."

Samana's attorney denied that his client was a terrorist. Washington's attorney in a pending state robbery case declined to comment on the federal terrorism charges because he had not been retained to represent Washington in that case.

Authorities caution that they have only begun to assess what other possible terrorist threats may be posed by prison groups, including the hundreds of gangs and splinter groups they already monitor inside the nation's largest correctional system.

But they view the emergence of JIS as a dangerous development that they admit they still cannot fully assess.

Richard Rimmer, a senior official at the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, declined to discuss specifics of the investigation. But he said the threat of violent Islamic radicals in the prisons is something "we take extremely seriously, because of the type of threat they represent."

Overall, California's correctional system, with about 165,000 felons, is home to seven major prison-based gangs and 1,100 other groups viewed as "disruptive" enough to be of concern.

Over the last 30 years, Islam has become a powerful force in America's correctional system, with estimates that 10% to 20% of the inmate population are Muslim.

Corrections officials around the country say that until the Los Angeles case, they had seen little or no evidence linking the practice of Islam with terrorist plots.