Booking photo of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office November 27, 2010. The Somali-born teenager was arrested on Friday for attempting to detonate what he thought was a car bomb at a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Oregon.
Multnomah County Sheriff's Office / Reuters
update on ANOTHER HAWIYE-American accused of plotting to bomb Oregon tree-lighting event.:Oregon bomb-plot suspect wanted 'spectacular show'Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, is too young to drink but apparently old enough to pursue jihad — the version preached by al-Qaeda. On Friday night he was taken into custody after authorities alleged he tried to ignite a phony bomb on a Portland, Oregon street near a packed public Christmas tree lighting ceremony. What he had actually done was detonate his own arrest in an FBI sting.
The FBI's detailed affidavit portrays Mohamud as hell-bent on bombing the popular annual event in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. The FBI complaint details how the undercover agents proposed other less lethal ways Mohamud could help the jihadi cause besides bombing, but the young man was steadfast. Indeed, the affidavit contains virulent quotes allegedly from Mohamud. "I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured"; "You know what I like to see? Is when I see the enemy of Allah then you know their bodies are torn everywhere"; "It's gonna be a fireworks show... a spectacular show... New York Times will give it two thumbs up"; "Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers... I thought that was awesome." It seemed to be another case of a young American radicalized by Islamist extremism. (See the influence of the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.)
But Mohamud seems to have been almost as angry at his family. The FBI affidavit never explains what prompted the Bureau to put Mohamud on the no-fly list, which prevented him from traveling to Alaska last June and got him an FBI interrogation instead, where he admitted that he had originally been planning to go to Yemen where he knew someone. It does say however that Mohamud later emailed the undercover FBI operative to say, "I was betrayed by my family, I was supposed to travel last year but Allah had decreed that I stay here longer." And according to the FBI report, in a goodbye video Mohamud recorded on Nov. 4 after a practice detonation, he had a specific message "to my parents, who held me back from jihad in the cause of Allah, I say to them, if you make allies with the enemy, then Allah's power will ask you about that on the day of judgment." (See the case of the would-be Broadway bomber.)
Mohamud's mother and father and his two sisters have remained silent since his arrest. (The Oregonian identified the parents as Mariam and Osman Barre; they reportedly split up a few years ago.) However, one prominent member of the Somali community in Portland (estimated to number 8,000) says a relative played some role in helping to put the FBI on the young man's trail — though that relative was almost certainly unaware of the scale it would assume. "Before this happened, the father informed Homeland Security and the FBI that something was going on with his son," claims Isgow Mohamed, the executive director of the Northwest Somali Community Organization who says he knows Mohamud's family well and had been in touch with them. "This a good family. The father in an engineer at Intel! This is not somebody who is on public assistance. He is a family man, a businessman, a religious man, a soccer player!"
Mohamed said emphatically that Mohamud's alleged plot should not be seen as representative of Somali Americans. "First of all we're really sorry, we do not support terror," he told TIME. "We came to live here and not bother anyone. We left a civil war!" Mohamed says he believes that Mohamud was influenced by things on the internet, but says that if anyone in the Somali community in Portland did as well, "We are not going to hide them. We are also Americans!" (There does not seem to be a link as well to Somalia's al-Shabab, the militant group that says it is allied with al-Qaeda and which some security experts fear may be trying to expand its influence beyond the Horn of Africa.) (Is Somalia's al-Shabab a global or a local movement?)
The FBI document indicates that federal agents asked for and received court authorization to begin surveillance of Mohamud and to track back his email. It is not yet clear what prompted the FBI to make the request — though family concerns that Mohamud was going to fly off to join terrorists might conceivably have set off the initial alarms. Indeed, relatives may have been concerned for a couple of years. Mohamud once attempted to get a visa to travel to Pakistan during a family visit to Britain but failed because his passport had not been valid. The affidavit says that Mohamud started thinking about jihad and becoming a mujahideen at the age of 15, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when he heard someone talking about martyrs. He allegedly said that he "didn't even have to hear anything else... This is a decision that I made... and if you don't sacrifice your own kids, when will victory come you know...."
According to the Associated Press, "agents began investigating Mohamud after receiving a tip from someone who was concerned about the teenager." Responding to a query from TIME, the Department of Justice would not confirm or deny whether Mohamud's father helped put him on the FBI's radar, saying only that "the FBI pursued multiple investigative techniques in this case and the affidavit references certain communications that took place as early as Aug. 2009. There is no factual allegation in the statement of probable cause regarding any tip from the community, and therefore it would be inappropriate to make any public comment."
If Mohamud's father did play a role in the case, it would be achingly familiar to the part played by the wealthy father of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit last year and who is now popularly known as the underwear bomber. Abdulmuttalab's father, a banker, allegedly went to the U.S. embassy in London to warn them of his son when he became alarmed at the young man's dalliance with jihadi ideology. (See the underwear bomber's privileged background.)
After receiving court permission, the Feds found Mohamud's August 2009 email contact with an unnamed "Unindicted Associate" who turned out to be in a volatile northwestern region of Pakistan. By December, Mohamud was allegedly discussing joining the man, as the affidavit says, "to prepare for violent jihad." (When he was stopped from flying to Alaska in June 2010, the FBI asked Mohamud if he knew anyone in Yemen and the young man named the unindicted associate he was in email contact with.) Mohamud then made an attempt to contact a second "Unindicted Associate" to plan his trip but messed up the email address by confusing it with a password. The FBI would later use this confusion to set up a similar email to lure Mohamud into the sting.
When he finally focused on Portland as a target, Mohamud allegedly told the FBI that he wasn't worried about U.S. security getting in his way because law enforcement does not "see it as a place where anything will happen. People say you know, why anybody want to do something in Portland, you know. It's on the west coast, it's in Oregon; and Oregon's like you know, nobody ever thinks about it." Asked what if the plan went badly, Mohamud said he wasn't worried "because if you were going to [Paradise] you wouldn't have to worry, right?" But he would eventually choose to "detonate" the car bomb by a remote cellphone call because, according to the affidavit, "martyrdom required the 'highest level of faith.' He was concerned that after living in the United States and attending college he may not have that 'high faith.'"
On Nov. 26, after a final inspection of what he believed would be an "amazing" bomb, Mohamud was asked once again by the undercover agent if he wanted to go through with it. He allegedly said yes and reportedly smiled when he heard a TV report that 25,000 were expected in Pioneer Courthouse Square that evening. But when the time came, Mohamud repeatedly dialed the designated trigger number and no explosion occured. Federal agents came shortly afterward to take away a kicking Mohamud, who shouted "Allahu Akhbar" — Arabic for "God is great." The affidavit said there was probable cause to charge him with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. time
The FBI's detailed affidavit portrays Mohamud as hell-bent on bombing the popular annual event in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. The FBI complaint details how the undercover agents proposed other less lethal ways Mohamud could help the jihadi cause besides bombing, but the young man was steadfast. Indeed, the affidavit contains virulent quotes allegedly from Mohamud. "I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured"; "You know what I like to see? Is when I see the enemy of Allah then you know their bodies are torn everywhere"; "It's gonna be a fireworks show... a spectacular show... New York Times will give it two thumbs up"; "Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers... I thought that was awesome." It seemed to be another case of a young American radicalized by Islamist extremism. (See the influence of the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.)
But Mohamud seems to have been almost as angry at his family. The FBI affidavit never explains what prompted the Bureau to put Mohamud on the no-fly list, which prevented him from traveling to Alaska last June and got him an FBI interrogation instead, where he admitted that he had originally been planning to go to Yemen where he knew someone. It does say however that Mohamud later emailed the undercover FBI operative to say, "I was betrayed by my family, I was supposed to travel last year but Allah had decreed that I stay here longer." And according to the FBI report, in a goodbye video Mohamud recorded on Nov. 4 after a practice detonation, he had a specific message "to my parents, who held me back from jihad in the cause of Allah, I say to them, if you make allies with the enemy, then Allah's power will ask you about that on the day of judgment." (See the case of the would-be Broadway bomber.)
Mohamud's mother and father and his two sisters have remained silent since his arrest. (The Oregonian identified the parents as Mariam and Osman Barre; they reportedly split up a few years ago.) However, one prominent member of the Somali community in Portland (estimated to number 8,000) says a relative played some role in helping to put the FBI on the young man's trail — though that relative was almost certainly unaware of the scale it would assume. "Before this happened, the father informed Homeland Security and the FBI that something was going on with his son," claims Isgow Mohamed, the executive director of the Northwest Somali Community Organization who says he knows Mohamud's family well and had been in touch with them. "This a good family. The father in an engineer at Intel! This is not somebody who is on public assistance. He is a family man, a businessman, a religious man, a soccer player!"
Mohamed said emphatically that Mohamud's alleged plot should not be seen as representative of Somali Americans. "First of all we're really sorry, we do not support terror," he told TIME. "We came to live here and not bother anyone. We left a civil war!" Mohamed says he believes that Mohamud was influenced by things on the internet, but says that if anyone in the Somali community in Portland did as well, "We are not going to hide them. We are also Americans!" (There does not seem to be a link as well to Somalia's al-Shabab, the militant group that says it is allied with al-Qaeda and which some security experts fear may be trying to expand its influence beyond the Horn of Africa.) (Is Somalia's al-Shabab a global or a local movement?)
The FBI document indicates that federal agents asked for and received court authorization to begin surveillance of Mohamud and to track back his email. It is not yet clear what prompted the FBI to make the request — though family concerns that Mohamud was going to fly off to join terrorists might conceivably have set off the initial alarms. Indeed, relatives may have been concerned for a couple of years. Mohamud once attempted to get a visa to travel to Pakistan during a family visit to Britain but failed because his passport had not been valid. The affidavit says that Mohamud started thinking about jihad and becoming a mujahideen at the age of 15, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when he heard someone talking about martyrs. He allegedly said that he "didn't even have to hear anything else... This is a decision that I made... and if you don't sacrifice your own kids, when will victory come you know...."
According to the Associated Press, "agents began investigating Mohamud after receiving a tip from someone who was concerned about the teenager." Responding to a query from TIME, the Department of Justice would not confirm or deny whether Mohamud's father helped put him on the FBI's radar, saying only that "the FBI pursued multiple investigative techniques in this case and the affidavit references certain communications that took place as early as Aug. 2009. There is no factual allegation in the statement of probable cause regarding any tip from the community, and therefore it would be inappropriate to make any public comment."
If Mohamud's father did play a role in the case, it would be achingly familiar to the part played by the wealthy father of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit last year and who is now popularly known as the underwear bomber. Abdulmuttalab's father, a banker, allegedly went to the U.S. embassy in London to warn them of his son when he became alarmed at the young man's dalliance with jihadi ideology. (See the underwear bomber's privileged background.)
After receiving court permission, the Feds found Mohamud's August 2009 email contact with an unnamed "Unindicted Associate" who turned out to be in a volatile northwestern region of Pakistan. By December, Mohamud was allegedly discussing joining the man, as the affidavit says, "to prepare for violent jihad." (When he was stopped from flying to Alaska in June 2010, the FBI asked Mohamud if he knew anyone in Yemen and the young man named the unindicted associate he was in email contact with.) Mohamud then made an attempt to contact a second "Unindicted Associate" to plan his trip but messed up the email address by confusing it with a password. The FBI would later use this confusion to set up a similar email to lure Mohamud into the sting.
When he finally focused on Portland as a target, Mohamud allegedly told the FBI that he wasn't worried about U.S. security getting in his way because law enforcement does not "see it as a place where anything will happen. People say you know, why anybody want to do something in Portland, you know. It's on the west coast, it's in Oregon; and Oregon's like you know, nobody ever thinks about it." Asked what if the plan went badly, Mohamud said he wasn't worried "because if you were going to [Paradise] you wouldn't have to worry, right?" But he would eventually choose to "detonate" the car bomb by a remote cellphone call because, according to the affidavit, "martyrdom required the 'highest level of faith.' He was concerned that after living in the United States and attending college he may not have that 'high faith.'"
On Nov. 26, after a final inspection of what he believed would be an "amazing" bomb, Mohamud was asked once again by the undercover agent if he wanted to go through with it. He allegedly said yes and reportedly smiled when he heard a TV report that 25,000 were expected in Pioneer Courthouse Square that evening. But when the time came, Mohamud repeatedly dialed the designated trigger number and no explosion occured. Federal agents came shortly afterward to take away a kicking Mohamud, who shouted "Allahu Akhbar" — Arabic for "God is great." The affidavit said there was probable cause to charge him with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. time
Portland's Somali community unites to condemn alleged Pioneer Courthouse Square bomb plot
Bomb suspect to classmate: 'I hate Americans'
Portland suspect: typical teen, dedicated jihadist?
My Take on this scambag
Yusof Wanly, imam at the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center, said Mohamud was a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture....
My Take :
The two groups that join the terrorist camps are the hyper religious who seemingly never leave the Mosque and the indulgers of sin who are looking for a quick way to heaven. born again Jehadest And the Portland Hawiye faggot clearly falls in the second camp.
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