A Somali man has been charged with plotting to bomb an Ohio shopping mall, the type of vulnerable target in the American heartland that US officials have warned that terrorists want to strike.
The four-count grand jury indictment unsealed on Monday in Columbus, Ohio, alleges Nuradin Abdi conspired with Iyman Faris, a convicted al-Qaeda operative who sought to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge, and others to detonate explosives at an unidentified mall in the Columbus area.
The alleged conspiracy began shortly after Abdi, 32, returned in March 2000 from training camps in Ethiopia to "ready himself to participate in violent jihadi conflicts" overseas and in the US, the government charged in court papers. Jihad is the Arabic word for holy struggle.
Abdi, who operated a small cellphone business, was arrested at his Columbus apartment by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Nov. 28. He had been under surveillance for months and initially was held on immigration violations, authorities said.
FBI officials and prosecutors in Ohio said no specific mall was targeted and there was no imminent threat of an attack when Abdi was arrested.
"The point here is that this plot was foiled while it was still in the planning stages," assistant US attorney Bill Hunt said at a news conference in Cincinnati.
Charges in the indictment, originally returned Thursday but kept secret until Monday, include providing material support to al-Qaeda, conspiracy to provide material support and document fraud. If convicted on all charges, Abdi could be sentenced to a maximum of 80 years in prison.
Abdi's 17-year-old brother, Mohamed AbdiKarani, said his brother loved the freedom of the US and never spoke out against the US government. Abdi has a son and daughter and his wife is pregnant, his brother said.
"He really hated terrorists," AbdiKarani said. "He loved it here. He never had as much freedom. He said it's good to raise his kids here."
AbdiKarani said Abdi was friends with Faris because they attended the same mosque. Columbus is home to more than 30,000 Somalis, the second-largest Somali community in the US, after Minneapolis.
Faris is serving a 20-year federal sentence after pleading guilty last June to providing material support to al-Qaeda. Faris, an Ohio-based truck driver originally from Kashmir, admitted plotting to sever the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and to derail trains in New York or Washington.
According to US immigration records, Abdi first entered the US in 1995, lived for a time in Ontario, Canada, and then returned to the US in August 1997. Abdi was granted asylum in the US as a refugee in January 1999 after giving false information to immigration officials, the government charges.
Later that year, he used that refugee status to apply for a travel document by falsely claiming he was planning to visit Germany and the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS