Gun range videos led FBI to Palestinian man accused of plot
A pair of trips to Houston-area gun ranges last summer were at the center of the first day of a federal trial of a Palestinian man who FBI Director Christopher Wray last year said was plotting an attack on Jewish people in Houston.
The two trips Sohaib Abuayyash took to Range USA in Cypress and Saddle River Range in Spring late last summer weren’t secret, according to testimony during the first day of his trial Monday in Houston’s downtown federal courthouse.
Abuayyash, 20, is charged with five counts of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He’s accused of possessing five guns while being in the United States unlawfully, according to federal court records.
Abuayyash visited the gun ranges with friends and coworkers, signed his names to waivers allowing him to use the range and was recorded shooting the guns on dozens of cameras, including his own, according to witnesses. He posted video of the visits on social media.
Federal prosecutors said the visits represented a crime, that Abuayyash knew he wasn’t supposed to possess guns and because he had overstayed his tourist visa he used to enter the U.S. in 2019. His attorneys, however, began setting up an argument that the visits to the range were, ultimately, the result of confusion stemming from the United States’ complex immigration laws.
“I expect the real issues in this case will be what this 19-year-old kid knew when he possessed the firearms,” said Marjorie Meyers, one of Abuayyash’s federal public defenders. It’s generally legal to have a gun in Texas, and that it’s up to individuals to understand if they’re not supposed to have one, she said.
“It is very important that you understand what it is about yourself that means that can’t have a firearm,” Meyers said.
Government prosecutors argued that Abuayyash had numerous warnings about his status, and the limits of it, before his arrest.
“The defendant was on notice that he had no status to be here,” U.S. Attorney Steven Schammel said.
The gun charges against Abuayyash were made public against a more sinister backdrop. In October, while testifying in front a Senate committee about terrorism threats to the U.S. following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Wray highlighted the FBI’s arrest of Abuayyash and said Abuayyash had been “studying how to build bombs and posted online about his support for killing Jews.”
During a detention hearing following this arrest, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered Abuayyash held in custody until his trial, citing evidence he had searched for ways to make a bomb and talked about martyrdom and referenced a Houston event for members of a particular religious group in online posts.
Abuayyash was arrested about a week before Wray’s testimony and before the attacks on Israel. Charging documents make no mention of terrorism or of Abuayyash having connections to extremist groups.
Inside the windowless ninthfloor courtroom, there was no mention of Wray’s comments or the worries outlined by the magistrate judge. The first day of Abuayyash’s trial was focused on his visits to the gun ranges and various documents related to his immigration status.
Prosecutors started testimony by calling employees from the gun ranges, who recounted being contacted by the FBI to help identify and locate Abuayyash. The businesses identified Abuayyash through security camera videos that showed him shooting pistols and rifles, and then by cross referencing the videos with waiver forms filled out at the range.
Later, Abuayyash’s former coworker at a tow truck company said they met at the Cypress gun range in August and shot the coworker’s guns. In September, Abuayyash joined a pair of cousins at the Spring range after connecting with one of the young men on TikTok. Again, Abuayyash used the other men’s guns, witnesses said.
Neither of the witnesses mentioned Abuayyash acting unusually during their trips to the gun range.
“Everything was normal from my point of view,” said Ahmed Jebril, one of the cousins who visited the range with Abuayyash.
The investigation into Abuayyash began after he saw the videos of the range visits on TikTok, said Keith Fogg, the FBI special agent who was the primary investigator on the case. Abuayyash had used a hashtag seeming to refer to the guns as airsoft replicas to avoid the videos being taken down by the application’s algorithms, Fogg said.
Abuayyash sat silently between his attorneys, wearing a blue shirt and brown pants. During breaks in the trial, he was put back into the handcuffs and led out of the courtroom.
An ATF agent identified the guns that were central to the case and told the jury the weapons had crossed state lines. They had been manufactured outside of Texas and were later brought to the state. Because the guns had been involved in interstate commerce, the case against Abuayyash can be tried in federal court. Other government witnesses confirmed, based on visas and passports granted to Abuayyash, that he was supposed to leave the country in December 2019.
He never left, and at one point he filled out an application seeking asylum in the United States. Government witnesses testified that the application doesn’t give a person legal status in the United States. Prosecutors sent through a series of documents that would have warned Abuayyash about his immigration status.
Abuayyash’s team got a government witness to admit that warnings on asylum documents had changed many times in recent years. By all indications, Abuayyash complied with terms of his pending application, including showing up to have his fingerprints and photographs taken.
At the end of Monday’s testimony, Abuayyash’s attorneys motioned for the charges to be dismissed, arguing that the government hadn’t proven its case that Abuayyash understood his legal status. District Court Judge Charles Eskridge denied the motion.
Both sides rested their cases on Tuesday, and the jury began its deliberations.