A 19-year-old Somali-American was to appear in court in Portland, Oregon, yesterday for attempting to set off a car bomb near a large crowd in the city.
Mohammed Osman Mohammed, charged with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction,” was arrested on Friday after trying to set off what he thought was an explosives-laden van parked near the tree ceremony in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square.
But the device was, in fact, a fake supplied by undercover agents from the FBI who had contacted Mohammed months before and pretended to be accomplices in the plot.
“The threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohammed was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” FBI special agent Arthur Balizan said.
The FBI and local police are also investigating a predawn fire on Sunday that gutted a room of a mosque attended by Mohammed in his home town of Corvallis, Oregon.
The overnight blaze “appears to have been intentionally set,” the town’s fire department said.
The mosque’s imam Yosof Wanly said he knew Mohammed, who began attending 18 months ago, but not regularly.
“It’s unfortunate because he is bringing attention to Islam in a negative way,” he told local CBS affiliate KVAL.
According to court documents, Mohammed exchanged e-mails with a contact in Pakistan’s northwest frontier province late last year and discussed the possibility of Mohammed traveling to Pakistan to engage in jihad.
In June this year, an FBI undercover agent contacted Mohammed — a naturalized US citizen and former student at Oregon State University — pretending to be an associate of his Pakistani contact.
After meeting the agent in Portland in July, he said he had been thinking of conducting a holy war against infidels since the age of 15 and suggested the plot to bomb Friday’s traditional pre-Christmas ceremony in the Oregon capital.
FBI operatives cautioned Mohammed several times about the seriousness of this plan, noting that there would be many children at the event.
However, Mohammed responded that he was looking for a “huge mass that will ... be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays,” the documents noted.
“It’s gonna be a fireworks show ... a spectacular show,” he was quoted as saying.
Referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, he also told undercover agents: “Do you remember when 9/11 happened, when those people were jumping from skyscrapers? ... I thought that was awesome.”
Earlier this month, Mohammed and the undercover FBI operatives traveled to a remote location in Lincoln County, Oregon, where they detonated a bomb concealed in a backpack as a rehearsal of the upcoming attack.
“I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured,” Mohammed said of the Christmas tree ceremony, according to the court documents.
That same day, he recorded a video, in which he read a written statement that offered a rationale for his bomb attack.
On Friday afternoon, hours before the planned attack, Mohammed met the undercover agents to make the final preparations.
“Mohammed went and looked at the bomb, which was in the back of a large white van. When Mohammed saw the bomb, he told the [undercover agents] it was ‘beautiful,’” the affidavit said.
He was arrested shortly after trying to detonate the fake bomb as the Christmas tree ceremony got underway.
“As Mohammed was transported from the arrest location he yelled ‘Allahu Akhbar’ and began violently kicking the agents and an officer in the transport vehicle and had to be restrained,” the affidavit read.
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