JOIN USThe men were taken into custody on Thursday as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and the local police executed search warrants on Long Island, in the suburbs of Boston and in New Jersey, as part of an effort to track the financing that bankrolled the unsuccessful attack, officials have said.
Under custody
They have not been charged in connection with any crime, but were still being held on administrative violations by the federal immigration authorities.
Attorney General Eric H Holder Jr said on Thursday that the investigators believed the three men had provided money to the naturalised Pakistani immigrant who admitted driving a sport utility vehicle packed with a crude bomb to Times Square.
But the attorney general said it was unclear if they knew the funds were going to be used for an act of terrorism.
One of the three men, Mohammad Shafiq Rahman, a computer programmer who was taken into custody in Portland, Maine, told his employer days earlier that he knew the accused would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, but had not seen him in nearly a decade.
The connections between the other two men, Pir Khan, 43, who until recently drove a cab in the Boston area, and Aftab Khan, who was in his 20s and worked in a gas station in Brookline, and Shahzad were unclear.
The New York Times