Oregon man guilty in bomb plot
He sought to attack a public Christmas tree ceremony with a fake device from the FBI.
A former Oregon State University student who had written of the need for jihad to “break the enemy’s will” was convicted Thursday of trying to bomb a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., in 2010
federal jury deliberated less than a day before reaching a verdict against Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 21, a Somali American who met for months with undercover FBI agents he thought were Al Qaeda operatives and plotted what he thought would be a spectacularly violent holiday attack.
Mohamud, whose father insists he was recruited and brainwashed by the FBI, faces a sentence of up to life in prison on the charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
“Mr. Mohamud made a series of choices over a period of several years — choices that were leading him down a path that would have ended in violence,” Greg Fowler, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Portland, said in a statement after the verdict. “His actions showed little regard for the rights and responsibilities that come with being an American, or respect for the lives that he was prepared to take.”
The defense said it would appeal.
The 20-day trial in downtown Portland took place a few blocks from where the bomb would have gone off if it had been real.
Prosecutors laid out a se- ries of recorded conversations and writings in which Mohamud, who was 18 when he met the two undercover agents, talked of the need to eliminate unbelievers and wage violent jihad against the West, at home and in Afghanistan.
“I can’t tell you how easy it should be to bring any community here in the West to its knees,” he wrote in an email to one of the undercover agents, who he thought was a terrorist recruiter, according to court documents.
Mohamud was born in Somalia but came to the United States at age 5 and grew up in the Portland suburb of Beaverton. His father is a software engineer at Intel Corp.
Prosecutors said the bomb Mohamud saw installed in the back of a van was fake. He was arrested after twice pressing the buttons of a cellphone that he thought would detonate the device.
The defense contends Mohamud was entrapped.
“This was not somebody sitting around thinking about blowing up Portland,” chief defense lawyer Stephen R. Sady told the jury, according to the Oregonian, which covered closing arguments in the case.
Mohamud’s father, Osman Barre, testified that he had contacted the FBI in 2009 when his son was planning to go to Yemen to study Arabic. He told agents that he feared his son was being brainwashed by Al Qaeda recruiters.
In the end, he said, it was the FBI who did his son more harm. Barre did not know that the FBI already had been watching his son for several months by the time they got Barre’s phone call.