The Justice Department announced criminal charges against a Kenyan member of the terrorist group al Shabab who federal prosecutors in New York said planned to hijack aircraft to conduct a “9/11-style attack in the United States.”
Cholo Abdi Abdullah, a member of the East African terrorist group that has sworn allegiance to al Qaeda, was arrested in the Philippines in July of last year and was transported to the U.S. on Tuesday to face six terrorism counts in a New York federal court. He faces a minimum of 20 years behind bars and up to life imprisonment if convicted.
“Beginning in 2016, at the direction of a senior al-Shabaab commander who was responsible for, among other things, planning the 2019 Nairobi hotel attack, Abdullah traveled to the Philippines and enrolled in a flight school there, for the purpose of obtaining training for carrying out the 9/11-style attack. Between 2017 and 2019, Abdullah attended the Flight School on various occasions and obtained pilot’s training, ultimately completing the tests necessary to obtain his pilot’s license,” the DOJ said. “While Abdullah was obtaining pilot training at the Flight School, he also conducted research into the means and methods to hijack a commercial airliner to conduct the planned attack, including security on commercial airliners and how to breach a cockpit door from the outside, information about the tallest building in a major U.S. city, and information about how to obtain a U.S. visa.”
Abdullah is charged with “conspiring to provide and providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, conspiring to commit aircraft piracy, conspiring to destroy aircraft, and conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.” Abdullah had been held in the Philippines since his arrest there more than a year ago.
The DOJ said a host of law enforcement agencies both in the U.S. and around the world helped stop the attack, including the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes FBI agents and NYPD detectives.
Al Shabab has taken credit for conducting a number of successful high-profile attacks in the past: the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi in 2013 conducted by four gunmen that resulted in the deaths of 62 civilians and five Kenyan soldiers, twin truck bombings in Mogadishu in 2017 that killed nearly 600 people, and a suicide bomber in Mogadishu in 2019 that killed at least 85 people.
“This chilling callback to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, is a stark reminder that terrorist groups like al Shabab remain committed to killing U.S. citizens and attacking the United States,” Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Wednesday. “But we remain even more resolute in our dedication to investigating, preventing, and prosecuting such lethal plots and will use every tool in our arsenal to stop those who would commit acts of terrorism at home and abroad.”
John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said that “this case, which involved a plot to use an aircraft to kill innocent victims, reminds us of the deadly threat that radical Islamic terrorists continue to pose to our nation” and that “no matter where terrorists who plan to target Americans may be located, we will seek to identify them and bring them to justice.”
The 19-page indictment against Abdullah, unsealed on Wednesday, goes into greater detail about the charges against him and his thwarted plans.
“Al-Shabaab, which has sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda and serves as the principal wing of that terrorist organization in East Africa, has escalated these deadly efforts as part of al-Qaeda’s global campaign to target Americans in response to the United States’ decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem in 2018,” the indictment reads. “That campaign — which al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda have debuted ‘Operation Jerusalem Will Never Be Judaized’ — has culminated in multiple attacks for which al-Shabaab has publicly claimed credit and which have resulted in the deaths of dozens of people, including U.S. nationals, as well as several other plots that have been foiled by law enforcement.”
The Pentagon said in early December that a “majority” of U.S. forces in the al Shabab stronghold of Somalia would be withdrawn by early 2021, although the Defense Department emphasized that “the U.S. is not withdrawing or disengaging from Africa.” A November report from the Pentagon’s inspector general noted that as of this summer, “between 650 and 800 troops were operating in Somalia.”
U.S. Africa Command said last week that an airstrike in Somalia killed eight al Shabab bomb-makers. AFRICOM has conducted at least 50 airstrikes in that al Shabab stronghold this year, according to the Military Times, compared to 63 in 2019, 47 in 2018, and 35 in 2017.
