Material Support/ Thought Crimes Prosecutions

  • Tampa man indicted on charges of planning ISIS terrorist attack

    Source: Tampa Patch. U.S. Attorney Maria Chapa Lopez announced the return of the indictment against Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari in the U.S. Courthouse in Tampa Friday. Al-Azhari was accused of purchasing guns and bomb-making materials and charged with attempting to provide material support or resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and violations of the National Firearms Act.

     
  • Tampa man accused of planning ISIS terrorist attack on Tampa Bay

    Source: Tampa Patch. The U.S. Department of Justice announced the filing of a criminal complaint charging Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari with “attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” namely ISIS. If convicted, Al-Azhari faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison. ;Read more here.

     
  • Alexandria man on FBI most wanted list indicted on terrorism charges

    Source: U.S. Dept. of State. A federal grand jury returned an indictment today charging an Alexandria man with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization operating in Somalia. According to court documents, Liban Haji Mohamed, 34, a Somali-born naturalized United States citizen, allegedly left the United States in July 2012 with the intent to join al-Shabaab in East Africa. According to court documents, Mohamed allegedly attempted to recruit an undercover agent to travel to Somalia to provide combat training to al-Shabaab fighters. Mohamed also allegedly planned to use his own media skills to improve al-Shabaab’s propaganda machine, which it has used to recruit Westerners.

     
  • Pakistani doctor arrested in Minnesota on terrorism charge

    Source: Associated Press. A Pakistani doctor who was working as a research coordinator at a medical clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was arrested Thursday on terrorism charges, after prosecutors say he told others that he pledged allegiance to ISIS and wanted to carry out “lone wolf” attacks in the United States. Muhammad Masood, 28, was arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Thursday by FBI agents and was charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

     
  • Prosecutors recommend maximum sentence for Columbia terror suspect

    Source: ABC 17 News. Federal prosecutors are recommending a Columbia man who admitted to trying to conspire with terrorists spend the maximum 20 years in prison. Robert Hester Jr. is set to be sentenced March 4 in Kansas City. He pleaded guilty in September to charges of trying to supply bomb-making materials to a terror group in late 2016. Hester was charged in federal court in 2017. According to court documents, he was making plans to bomb a Kansas City bus station with people he believed were members of the terror group ISIS, but were actually undercover law enforcement personnel.

     
  • US prosecutors end old terror case against California man

    Source: Associated Press. Federal prosecutors said on Friday that they won’t pursue charges after a judge last year overturned the conviction of Hamid Hayat, who had been linked to a purported al-Qaida sleeper cell in California and spent 14 years in prison. “While we are grateful for the dismissal, the 14 years Hamid spent behind bars on charges of which he was innocent remain a grave miscarriage of justice,” his family and lawyers said in their statement. They noted that both the federal judge and a federal magistrate found that multiple witnesses credibly testified, years after his conviction, that Hamid could not have committed the crimes. Both judges decided “that Hamid would not have been found guilty had the powerful evidence of his innocence that won his freedom in 2019 been presented to his jury in 2006,” the attorneys and family said in their statement.

     
  • Man who discussed US attack gets nearly 5 years in prison

    Source: Associated Press. A 21-year-old New York man, Fabjan Alameti was sentenced in federal court in Missoula on Friday to four years and nine months in prison after previously pleading guilty to two counts of lying to a federal officer about making terrorism-related comments.

     
  • St. Louis County man gets 8 years in prison for aiding ISIS commander in Syria

    Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ramiz Zijad Hodzic, 45, recruited a handful of his fellow Bosnian immigrants to help Abdullah Ramo Pazara, who lived in St. Louis County until he left for Syria in 2013. He pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and one count of providing material support to terrorists. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry called the case difficult and complicated, saying that federal sentencing guidelines, including terrorism enhancements, overstated the seriousness of Hodzic’s crimes by recommending 30 years in prison.

     
  • Suspect In Pittsburgh church bomb plot indicted on terrorism charges

    Source: CBS Pittsburgh. The indictment charges him with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS, and two counts of distributing information relating to an explosive, destructive device or weapon of mass destruction. U.S. Attorney Soo Song told the judge that Alowemer slowly fine-tuned his plan of attack. She said he wrote his intentions online, and then handwrote those plans, including a 10-point guide where he placed X’s and checkmarks as he worked through the list. However, Alowemer’s defense attorney said his client is just a young man engaged in “puffery” and “bragging.”

     
  • Texas man accused of trying to aid Islamic State group pleads guilty

    Source: CBS DFW. Prosecutors say 20-year-old Kaan Sercan Damlarkaya, who was 18 the time of his crime, pleaded guilty Monday to attempting to provide material support to the Salafi jihadist militant group. Damlarkaya, who is a U.S. citizen, was arrested in December 2017 following an undercover FBI investigation. He remains in custody pending sentencing in Houston and faces up to 20 years in federal prison.