Despite the ability of such threats to evade detection, U.S. and Western intelligence services have caught quite a few of these converts, mainly dropouts, drug-users and misfits.

But since the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001, hundreds of people born or brought up in Western countries have drifted into the jihadist orbit. They are highly prized as "clean skins," operatives who can move around in Western society with a familiarity that Arab and Asian jihadists cannot.

According to a recent report by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on al-Qaida, "as many as three dozen criminals who converted to Islam in American prisons have moved to Yemen where they could pose a significant threat to attack the U.S."

"There is very little hard data on conversion to Islam due to the difficulty in gathering proper statistics, says Milena Uhlman, a Berlin researcher who had studied the phenomenon in Europe.

"Nevertheless, it appears that both conversions and Islamic outreach to coverts is increasing."

The current alert for English-speaking jihadists purportedly heading for the United States emerged from the capture of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, a Nigerian convert to Islam, who has been charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day.

He was recruited by al-Qaida in Yemen, where he want to study Arabic, and was influenced by jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also linked to the Muslim army major who is charged with the deaths of 13 people in the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in November.

Abdulmuttalab's alleged attempt to blow up the Airbus, apparently using explosives sewn into his underwear was a rerun of another convert, Richard Reid, a small-time British thief, the "Shoe Bomber." He tried to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001, using explosives hidden in his shoe but like Abdulmuttalab fumbled his bid for martyrdom.

Both these attacks displayed innovative planning by al-Qaida, both in the unusual type of bomb employed and in using recruits who did not arouse suspicion, to evade tight security at airports.

Al-Qaida "planners are adaptive and innovative," according to analyst Scott Stewart of the U.S. security consultancy Stratfor.

"They will adjust the operatives they select for a mission in order to circumvent new security measures.

"In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when security forces began to focus additional scrutiny on people with Muslim names, they dispatched Richard Reid on his show-bombing mission. And it worked -- Reid was able get his device past security and onto the plane."

Using a young Nigerian, whose father is a leading banker in his homeland, was also "a total paradigm shift" that almost succeeded in wholesale slaughter, Scott concluded.

Operations like these make the terrorist-profiling programs employed in the United States and Europe redundant.

Among other converts recruited by al-Qaida were:

-- Jack Roche, a 50-year-old Briton sentenced to nine years' imprisonment in Australia in June 2004 for trying to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra and for links with al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiya, an Indonesian jihadist offshoot.

-- Lionel Dumont, a French citizen, was arrested in Germany in December 2003 and five months later was extradited to France where he had been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in 2001 for belonging to the Roubaix Gang, a band of Islamic militants, all veterans of the Bosnia war, who robbed banks in France.

-- Germaine Lindsay, a British citizen of Caribbean descent, who was one of the suicide squad that killed 60 people and wounded more than 700 in a series of bombings of London's transportation system July 7, 2005.

-- Jose Padilla, the American "Dirty Bomber" who trained in Afghanistan and was arrested in Chicago in May 2002. He was accused of plotting to detonate a radiological bomb but that charge was dropped. He was sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment in January 2008 on terrorism-related charges.

-- David Courtailler, a 29-year-old Frenchman who was sentenced by a Paris court to two years' imprisonment in May 2004 for links to a terrorist organization in Afghanistan. His brother Jerome, another convert, was sentenced to six years by a Dutch court in June 2004 for plotting attacks on U.S. targets in France and Belgium.

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