US officials arrested three Pakistani Americans including two imams yesterday, charging them and three others with providing or seeking to provide “material support” to the Pakistani Taliban, the Justice Department said.

The defendants, five men and one woman, “are charged with conspiring to provide, and providing, material support to a conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap persons overseas, as well as conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organisation, specifically, the Pakistani Taliban,” the department said in a statement.

Three of the defendants, including a 76-year-old imam of a Miami mosque, “are also charged with providing material support to the Pakistani Taliban,” namely the transfer of funds to finance the group, which Washington lists as a terror organisation.

At least five of the defendants are members of the same family.

The two men arrested in Florida, identified as US nationals Hafiz Khan, the imam and family patriarch, and his son Izhar Khan, 24, also an imam at a separate Florida mosque, are due to appear in federal court in Miami tomorrow.

A second son, Irfan Khan, was arrested in Los Angeles. Three others, including Khan’s daughter and her son, are at large in Pakistan.

Each face up to 15 years in prison per count.

The revelations come amid a period of great turmoil in ties between Islamabad and Washington in the aftermath of the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the recent double suicide bombing of a paramilitary police training centre in northwest Pakistan that killed 89 people, in an attack it said was to avenge Bin Laden’s death at the hands of US forces.