A young Mississippi couple who are charged with attempting to join the Islamic State group were ordered held without bail on Tuesday, pending federal grand jury action on the charges.
Jaelyn Delshaun Young, 20, and Mohammad “Mo” Dakhlalla, 22, were arrested at a local airport just before boarding a flight with tickets bound for Istanbul, Turkey.
A US magistrate judge in Oxford, Mississippi, denied them bail, saying that although the pair have never been in trouble with the law and have relatives willing to oversee their home confinement, their desire to commit terrorism is “probably still there.”
Photo: AP
Urging the court to keep the suspects in custody, Assistant US Attorney Clay Joyner likened them to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, saying that they could commit violence with knives, vehicles or homemade weapons.
“They don’t need a gun to do harm,” Joyner said. “They don’t need military training to do harm. What they need is a violent, extremist ideology, and that’s exactly what they have espoused.”
After FBI agents arrested the pair at a Mississippi airport, they filed criminal charges that both were attempting and conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist group, a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of US$250,000.
An FBI agent’s affidavit said both confessed their plans after their arrest.
Defense attorneys declined to comment after the hearing, but told the court that the material did not prove either had committed a crime.
Court papers said both Young and Dakhlalla are US citizens.
The government said FBI agents began interacting online with Young in May about her desire to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It said her Twitter page said the only thing keeping her from traveling to Syria was her need to earn money.
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