FBI: Plotting suicide bomber arrested near U.S. Capitol building in sting
(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON - The FBI says it has arrested a man who thought he on his way to carry out a bombing attack at the U.S. Capitol building, but who, in reality, was dealing with FBI undercover operatives all along.
According to a Capitol Hill source, the suspect is Amine El Khalifi, 29, a Moroccan citizen who has lived in the U.S. for over 12 years. Law enforcement officials said he was arrested Friday morning after he put on what he thought was a vest containing explosives. In fact, the Justice Department says, the vest had inert material that was not explosive.
Authorities say the suspect was living in Alexandria, Va. and has been seeking assistance in executing a terrorist attack against the United States.
After developing intelligence on the suspect the FBI launched an undercover sting operation.
Sources say as the suspect continued contact with the undercover agents, his plans became more ambitious, and he eventually decided to become the first terrorist suicide bomber on US soil.
He met with the undercover agents Friday morning who provided him with what he believed was a suicide vest in a garage in Alexandria. As he set off on his mission he was taken down by FBI agents from the Bureau's Washington Field Office, Joint Terrorism Task Force.
FBI officials say the suspect had been under close observation "for months."
Scooter wrote:So the people who provided him with what he thought were the explosives were FBI operatives.
Would the thought to acquire them by other means have even occurred to him otherwise?
Since the thought to acquire explosives occurred to him in the first place, it's likely he would have used whatever means available to him to find them.
Scooter wrote:And did the idea to become the first suicide bomber on U.S. soil originate with him, or was it fed to him by those same operatives?
Since he decided to become a suicide bomber on U.S. soil and he lives here, I'm not sure what other plan he could have come up with.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
is whether he began seeking that assistance before or after he first came into contact with those FBI operatives.
And that is the difference between entrapment and not. We have a similar case in Portland that will be decided by the courts soon. Interestingly, the potential terrorist here was exposed by his family that was concerned by his extremist statements and increasingly alarming actions.
Joe Guy wrote:Do you believe that the FBI created this person in order to take credit for preventing a terrorist attack?
I believe he is a real person. I do not believe it to be beyond the realm of reasonable possibility that law enforcement officers would put ideas into the head of an easily influenced person in order to see where it might lead.
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
This case would be a joke if he is an unstable person who obviously would have no idea how to commit a terrorist act without being coaxed & led on.
But if he appeared to be an otherwise intelligent person who seemed to be intent on becoming a suicide bomber (if it's possible to be otherwise intelligent and want to be a suicide bomber) he might have been very dangerous and a tragedy may have been prevented by the FBI.
Yes, we have entrapment laws. The FBI are reasonably well educated by the US Attorneys on the line between sting & entrapment. This is not to say that these cases don't sometimes fall apart in the face of a good defense.
Scooter, Sue U: Should law enforcement never use undercover agents or confidential informants?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
Of course they should, and I do not know that anything untoward happened here. But the vagueness of the timeline (particularly an interesting choice of tenses - which could have been either a clumsy grammatical mistake or a deliberate attempt at obfuscation) caught my eye and made me ask why the story was recounted as it was.
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
Thanks for tracking down the link, Keld. Clearly, based on that affidavit, there is probable cause -- an illegal alien, looking to detonate a suicide bomb in a crowded D.C. are restaurant/government building, and all suggested by the potential terrorist. It is good to know that people alert the FBI and the FBI is has enough skilled operatives to deal with these potential threats and diffuse them before they ever become an actual threat.
It is indeed an easy read, and after reading it I have more doubts than ever about the legitimacy of this operation, because it is written in obfuscatory language.
Let's start with the inital meeting. A confidential informant says an individual produced an AK-47 and made a statement about the war on terrorism being a war on Muslims, with which EL Khalifi is alleged to have agreed. But it doesn't say that that the CI saw someone produce the weapon and heard him make those comments. IOW, it could very well have been the confidential informant himself that produced the weapon and made the statements in question, and who therefore instigated the entire sequence of events.
It goes on to say that El Khalifi went with "Hussein" to meet "Yusef", who is an FBI agent. But it never says who Hussein is, or what his relationship to Yusef is, or whose idea it was for El Khalifi and Hussein to meet Yusef. And it says that El Khalifi believed Yusef belonged to an armed extremist group, but it doesn't say how he came to that belief - did "Hussein" tell him, or Yusef, or was it a conclusion that El Khalifi came to out of thin air? And then there are conversations reported between Hussein and El Khalifi, with Yusef not apparently present. So how did these conversations come to be known by the FBI, unless Hussein is also an FBI agent, or an FBI informant (perhaps even the CI referred to at the outset), or, indeed, perhaps even the author of this criminal complaint, being modest about his own involvement in the affair.
There is more of the same, but I think you get the idea.
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
A man has been arrested near the US Capitol building as part of an anti-terror investigation, US officials say.
Amine El Khalifi, 29, of Alexandria, Virginia was taken into custody by the FBI.
Officials told US media the man thought he was heading to carry out a suicide attack on the Washington DC building, home to the US Congress.
He was "closely and carefully monitored" for weeks, according to the FBI and US Capitol police.
Authorities say the public was never in any danger.
Mr Khalifi allegedly thought undercover FBI agents he was working with were members of the al-Qaeda network.
However, he was not believed to have any known existing connections to al-Qaeda, officials said.
Mr Khalifi was said to have overstayed a visitor visa for years, and was under investigation for more than a year, according to the Associated Press news agency.
He carried a vest he thought was packed with explosives, reports said, but had in fact been supplied and made harmless by undercover agents.
"Explosives the suspect allegedly sought to use in connection with the plot had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement and posed no threat to the public," a spokesman for the US Justice Department said.
Mr Khalifi was not arrested on the Capitol grounds and had been under surveillance for several weeks, AP reported.
US law enforcement officials routinely carry out "sting" operations in an effort to stop potential terror suspects.
In one of the most recent incidents, in September 2011, 26-year-old US citizen Rezwan Ferdaus was arrested for allegedly plotting to fly explosive-packed, remote controlled planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol building.
There have been number of convictions based on stings in recent years, the BBC's Adam Brookes reports from Washington.
However, Muslim groups and civil rights groups have expressed concern at the way the FBI uses stings in counter-terrorism cases.
If this geezer had "overstayed a visitor visa for years", why let him go through with this pantomime before arresting him? Surely they had grounds to kick him out before it got anywhere near the wearing fake suicide vests stages?
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
