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.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS