All four allegedly were linked to Al-Shebab ("The Boys") Islamist movement in Somalia, which is aligned with al-Qaida and is fighting to topple the shaky Western-backed transitional government in Mogadishu, capital of the war-ravaged Horn of Africa failed state. At least one was a veteran of the fighting there.

The terror threat spawned by the Somali conflict is spreading rapidly in the United States, Europe and Western outposts such as Australia.

The fear is that young Somalis, the children of refugees fleeing the savagery that has consumed their homeland since 1991, who join Al-Shebab in Somalia will eventually return.

Carrying the passports of their adopted countries, they will be able to slip under the security defenses to join the global network of jihadist cells that have sprung up in recent years.

But whether or not the case proceeds, it underlines the extent of disenchantment among the Somali diaspora in Australia and fellow Muslims in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, and the terror threat they pose.

Australia's security watchdogs are not the only ones concerned about how the Somali conflict alone is spawning a new generation of jihadist warriors who could one day turn on the governments that gave their families succor.

In the United States, authorities have been concerned since Oct. 29, 2008, that the winds of war in Somalia were blowing their way.

That was when a Somali college student from Minneapolis, Shirwa Ahmed, 27, and another from Britain, 21-year-old Ahmed Hussein Ahmed (no relation), were among several jihadists who carried out suicide bomb attacks in northern Somalia.

The five coordinated attacks were the most sophisticated seen in Somalia to date.

Shirwa Ahmed was the first U.S. citizen ever to carry out a suicide bombing. The FBI says he and others were radicalized and recruited in the U.S. cities where they lived.

That grim discovery, and the prospect of an organized jihadist network in America's heartland, is giving U.S. security authorities nightmares.

After his death was disclosed, several families among the 200,000-strong Somali community spread across the United States reported sons who had gone to their ancestral homeland to join Al-Shebab, designated a terrorist organization by Washington.

Al-Shebab "presents U.S. authorities with the most serious evidence to date of a 'homegrown' terrorist recruitment problem right in the American homeland," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who is an expert on terrorism.

Hoffman, a former adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency, noted the problem of immigrant terrorists that Britain and Europe have grappled with for several years.

"I wonder if we're not catching up and finding that problems which are so consuming the U.K. are coming here," he said in a recent report for the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that monitors Islamist Web sites.

"Al-Qaida's aim has always been to have people inside the U.S. with U.S. passports. Here you have a cadre of susceptible individuals and you have people ready to take advantage of that."

In Britain, a growing number of young men among the estimated 70,000 Somali immigrants are going to Somalia to join Al-Shebab, authorities say.

Two of the four men convicted of plotting to bomb London's transportation system on July 21, 2005, were from Somalia. They and two Ethiopian-born Britons were found guilty of conspiracy to murder.

The Times of London reported in May that "up to 1,000" foreign jihadists, including Britons, have answered the call to jihad in Somalia and have played an important role in recent Al-Shebab advances in the conflict.

"If this threat is not contained, Somalia could become the Swat Valley of Africa," commented Ted Dagne, a Washington-based Somalia expert.

MI5, Britain's counterintelligence service, is sufficiently concerned that it has downgraded the threat of terrorism by veterans of the Iraq conflict and put extra resources into combating the threat from the Somalia-East Africa arena.

In Sweden, security authorities say that 20 Swedish citizens have gone to Somalia in recent months to join Al-Shebab.

The Swedish security service, known as Sakerhetpolisen or SAPO, suspects that other sons of Somali refugee families may also have traveled to Somalia that they do not know about.

Several Swedish citizens have been reported killed fighting in Somalia.

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