An FBI sweep launched in Puerto Rico to prevent a “domestic terrorist attack” is eliciting widespread outrage on the island – and as far away as New York City – with critics accusing the agency of trying to use terrorism as a guise to turn public opinion against Puerto Rico’s independence movement.

The Friday morning raid on the U.S. commonwealth, which targeted five private homes and one business, was launched to prevent attacks from the Boricua Popular Army, the FBI said. The special agent in charge of the San Juan Division of the FBI, Luis Fraticelli, said the searches were undertaken because investigations disclosed planning was under way for an attack “where explosive devices were to be used.” It was to be “directed at privately owned interests in Puerto Rico, as well as the general public,” he said Friday. No arrests were made.

The pro-independence group, also known as the Macheteros, or “cane cutters,” engaged in violent attacks in the 1970s and 1980s, and took credit for the 1979 bombing of a U.S. Navy bus that killed two American sailors. More recently, it has taken credit for bombings of American military and government sites on the island.

While recent polls have indicated that most of Puerto Rico’s residents do not support independence from America, criticism of the raid quickly spread beyond the movement’s sympathizers.

From the governor of the island to lawyers to journalists, calls came out to investigate the FBI’s operations on the island.

Although residents of Puerto Rico, a former Spanish colony, are American citizens, they cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, and pay no federal taxes.

Public displeasure with the FBI was already high. The sweep comes on the heels of the death of one the group’s leaders, Filiberto Ojeda Rios, during an FBI raid in September. Authorities allegedly did not offer medical assistance to Ojeda Rios, who had been charged with the robbery of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo bank in 1983 and was living as a fugitive in Puerto Rico.

Further fueling the outrage at the FBI were images from one of Friday’s raids showing a pepper-spray attack against journalists at one of the homes searched. One reporter needed to seek medical help after the incident.

“Pepper gas, shoves, choking journalists, tossed stones, and broken car glass characterize the raid by FBI agents on the apartment of the militant independent activist, Liliana Laboy,” a local daily, El Vocero, reported in Spanish.

Mr. Fraticelli defended the action, saying that when “members of the media and the general public attempted to cross the established law enforcement perimeter” agents used “non-lethal force” to control the situation.

Puerto Rican newspapers reported yesterday that the island’s police chief, Pedro Toledo, a former FBI agent, had accused the agency of excessive force.

“It was an improper use, abnormal,” the daily El Nuevo Dia reported Mr. Toledo as saying, recalling that during the 1980s there were regular raids against the Boricua Popular Army without disintegrating into violence like on Friday. “This gas is used when your life is in danger, against an assailant, not a journalist.”

Mr. Toledo said there would likely be a federal investigation.

“It’s yet another abuse of the power of the FBI in Puerto Rico,” the president of the Puerto Rican bar, Julio Fontanet, said. Speaking in Spanish from Puerto Rico, he said the group plans to take the issue to the U.N. Commission of Human Rights and to the Organization of American States. “There is grave indignation against the FBI that is growing every day.”

The Puerto Rican Association of Journalists yesterday called the attack on the reporters and photojournalists “vicious, vengeful, and antidemocratic.” The group said recorded footage proved the journalists did not overstep the boundaries federal agents had set.

In America, calls are beginning to circulate for investigations into the incident.

“Under the guise of Homeland Security and the pretense of ‘terrorism,’ the U.S. has unleashed the repressive and occupying forces of the FBI in the streets of Puerto Rico,” state Assemblyman Jose Rivera said in a statement, calling on Rep. Charles Rangel to launch a congressional hearing. “The only ‘domestic terrorist attack’ here is the attack of the United States Government on the people of Puerto Rico.”

A Puerto Rican independence group, the Prolibertad Freedom Campaign, is organizing a protest of the sweep for today at 5 p.m. at the Federal Building in New York.

A spokesman for the FBI, Harry Rodriguez, yesterday refused to respond to criticisms of the operation.