Former OSU student admits trying to kill judge
Former Ohio State University student Yahya Farooq Mohammad admitted Monday in federal court in Toledo that while he was in jail awaiting trial on charges of supporting terrorism, he tried to hire a hit man to kill the judge assigned to his case.
Mohammad, 39, a citizen of India, is expected to be sentenced to 27 years in prison and ordered removed from the United States after he serves his time in prison.
He pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiracy to provide and conceal material, support or resources to terrorists for raising a total of about $29,000 that was delivered to American-born terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2009. He also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a crime of violence for a 2016 plot to have U.S. District Court Judge Jack Zouhary, the Toledo judge overseeing his case, kidnapped and murdered.
The two charges carry a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison, but as part of a plea agreement that calls for a 27 -year sentence, Mohammad agreed that he would not appeal and that he would be deported — permanently — from the United States to his native India.
“If I agree to this, you will be removed and never allowed under any conditions to return,” Chief Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr., of the Southern District of Ohio, told Mohammad. Sargus, who works out of the federal court in Columbus, was appointed to preside over the terrorism case after the plot on Zouhary’s life was revealed and Zouhary recused himself last year.
Mohammad, who is now being held at the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, was awaiting trial at the time of the murder plot along with his brother, Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, 36, of Euless, Texas; and brothers Sultane Roome Salim, 41, of Columbus, and Asif Ahmed Salim, 35, who most recently lived in the United Arab Emirates.
The four were indicted in 2015 for allegedly providing financial support to al-Awlaki, an Islamic lecturer-turnedterrorist who was was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.
Defense attorney Thomas Durkin pointed out that the plea agreement was “not a cooperation agreement,” meaning Yahya Farooq Mohammad will not be required to testify at the trials later this year of his co-defendants. Durkin said afterward that his client accepted the plea agreement because it will enable him to get out of prison when he’s around the age of 60.
Yahya Farooq Mohammad, whose sentencing date was not set, abandoned his studies in electrical engineering at Ohio State in 2004. Sultane Salim attended Ohio State from 1992 to 1998, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He was president of the Muslim Students Association and worked as a financial analyst in Westerville. Asif Salim attended Ohio State from 2000 to 2005, and in 2001 was quoted in a Dispatch article in 2001 about Muslim student organizations on college campuses openly raising money for groups whose assets had been frozen by the U.S. government because of alleged ties to terrorists.