Three men suspected of funneling cash to Times Square terrorist Faisal Shahzad were busted yesterday as federal agents stormed addresses from Long Island to Maine in an effort to derail the terror money train.
The suspects — all Pakistani natives — were rousted in dramatic early-morning FBI raids sparked by Shahzad’s cooperation since his May 3 arrest.
“I heard one FBI [agent] scream, ‘FBI, put your hands up!’ ” said Watertown, Mass., resident Vincent Lacerra, who looked out his window at 6:30 a.m. to see agents surrounding his neighbor’s home across the street. “They had machine guns drawn at the house.”
About 15 minutes later, a man was pulled out of the house in handcuffs and leg shackles, Lacerra told The Post. Agents were also seen removing a computer, documents and other items.
Two other people were picked up on immigration charges, one in Allston, Mass., and the other in Maine.
The Boston Herald reported that the Allston man, Pir Khan, is a cabdriver convicted in 2002 of illegal entry and “concealment of facts.”
At least two Long Island men of Middle Eastern origin were questioned by federal authorities, but not charged. Another man being sought was not located, sources said.
Hours after the raids, The Washington Post reported the Pakistani government had busted a man with connections to a militant group who said he acted as an accomplice of Shahzad.
The suspect — whose arrest hadn’t been previously disclosed — provided an “independent stream” of evidence that the Pakistani Taliban was behind Times Square incident, the newspaper reported.
The suspect also admitted helping Shahzad travel into Pakistan’s tribal areas for bomb training.
Officials cautioned that there have been inconsistencies in the accounts given by Shahzad and the man picked up in Pakistan, the newspaper said.
The suspect in Pakistani custody is believed to have a connection to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, a US intelligence official was quoted saying.
In Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder said authorities believe that the three men arrested men in the United States provided funds to Shahzad.
“One of the things we’re trying to determine,” Holder said, is whether those men knew the money was earmarked for Shahzad’s effort to explode a homemade propane-gasoline-fertilizer car bomb in Times Square two weeks ago.
All three were held for suspected immigration violations.
“The people might be completely innocent and not know what they were providing for, but it’s clear there’s a connection [with Shahzad],” a top Massachusetts law-enforcement official told The Associated Press.
A source told The Post that investigators have been probing Shahzad’s connections on Long Island since he was nabbed and began spilling the beans to authorities.
Meanwhile, two brothers in Cherry Hill, NJ, were questioned, and agents searched a Camden print shop one of them owns, according to the FBI. Neither was charged.
Authorities have determined that Shahzad received money while he plotted the bomb attack through a centuries-old Islamic money system known as hawala or hundi, CBS News reported.
Hawala allows brokers overseas and in the United States to get money to intended targets through an honor system in which funds collected in one country act as credit for money doled out in another.
“It’s a remitting system where no money actually goes back and forth,” said Paul Rossi, who once served in an NYPD intelligence division that focused on terror and is current deputy director of the New York State Tax Enforcement Office.
“It is legal in some parts of the world. It’s not legal in the United States,” said Rossi, who has seen hawala used by cigarette smugglers, other criminals and terrorists.
Mohammed Iqbal, 43, a limo driver from Pakistan who lives in Shirley, LI, said federal agents banged on his door early yesterday and asked him about a phone call he recently made to a former co-worker from a 7-Eleven.
“They asked me if I did money through hundi,’ ” Iqbal, a father of five who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, told The Post. “I said no.”
“They asked me, ‘Do you send any money to Pakistan?’ I said, ‘Who am I going to send money to?’ They said, ‘Did you send any money to anybody here,’ ” Iqbal said, adding that he then denied sending money to anyone in the United States.
“I don’t known anything about that guy,” Iqbal said, referring to Shahzad.
Iqbal said that, with his permission, the agents searched his home extensively.
“I said, ‘No problem. I’ve got nothing to hide,’ he recalled. “They went through every single thing.”
“Even my socks, they opened.”
The Centereach, LI, home of the man Iqbal recently called — 43-year-old Muhammad Younis — also was visited yesterday morning by federal authorities.
Younis, a Home Depot employee, began renting the residence last year with his American wife, Kristina, and their 11-year-old daughter.
His landlord, Ashim Chakraboty, called them “very nice people.”
“I think he likes America,” Chakraboty said. “He’s a very good person. Sometimes, I look through the window and I see him taking prayer . . . He doesn’t make any problems.”
Chakrabroty said agents spent five hours yesterday questioning Younis and also searched a backyard shed and two Nissans owned by the family.
“They checked everything. They opened the trunk, the [gas] tank, everything,” Chakrabroty said.
Younis’ wife, Kristina, screamed at reporters from behind a closed door yesterday, saying, “You ruin people’s lives! Go away!
“Go find the real terrorist. We’ve done nothing wrong!”
A neighbor, Arlette Sirvis, said that she and others in the past week have seen about a half-dozen unmarked cars conducting surveillance on the Younis residence, as well as “people walking around the streets we didn’t know.”
“We figured out something had to be going on,” Sirvis said. “My neighbors said she saw Pakistani men gathered around [Younis’] car looking in the trunk a couple of weeks ago. She thought it was odd.”
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli and Murray Weiss