Three Brooklyn men from former Soviet bloc nations plotted to support the Islamic State, and one of them volunteered to kill President Barack Obama if the terror group requested, the Justice Department charged Wednesday.
Federal agents arrested one member of the trio, Akhror Saidakhemetov, as he boarded a flight to Turkey early Wednesday at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport with plans to travel to Syria to fight jihad, or holy war, prosecutors said. They said that Saidakhmetov recently expressed interest in buying a machine guy to shoot police and FBI agents if his travel plans to join the Islamic State were thwarted.
Another, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, had said he’d be willing to kill Obama and had previously bought a plane ticket to fly from New York to Istanbul next month, federal prosecutors said.
Airport arrests are becoming a familiar scenario as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies scramble to stem the flow of young recruits, most lured by crafty internet appeals, seeking to join the Islamic State’s violent crusade in parts of Syria and Iraq.
The latest criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn, where U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch is presiding over a hub of federal terrorism prosecutions as she awaits confirmation to replace U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York built the case.
Saidakhmetov and Juraboev were to appear in court in Brooklyn. A third defendant, Abror Habibov, was scheduled to appear before a U.S. magistrate in Jacksonville, Fla.
Federal agents first took an interest in Juraboev last August, when he made a posting on an Uzbek-language website that propagates the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, one name of the terror group that has seized a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, the complaint says.
Investigators later learned that Juraboev and Saidakhmetov, a citizen of Kazakhstan, were planning to travel to Syria by way of Turkey. Juraboev also expressed a willingness to engage in terrorism on U.S. soil if the Islamic State requested him to do so, including killing Obama, the complaint said. Saidakhmetov said he also would attempt domestic terrorism, such as killing law enforcement officers, if he weren’t able to travel to the Middle East, it said.
The third defendant, Habibov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, helped finance Saidakhmetov’s efforts to join the Islamic State.
“The flow of foreign fighters to Syria represents an evolving threat to our country and to our allies,” Lynch said in a statement. “Anyone who threatens our citizens, here or abroad, will face the full of American justice.”
If convicted of the charges, each of the three men face up to 15 years in prison.
.jpg)
Comments