Two Michigan men face federal charges of plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on Halloween inspired by the Islamic State, according to a complaint filed over the weekend.
According to the court filing, Mohmed Ali and Majed Mahmoud, along with a third, unidentified person, purchased AR-15-style rifles, stockpiled other firearms and ammunition, and used the encrypted platform WhatsApp to coordinate the timing of their planned strike. An affidavit adds that the F.B.I. learned about some details of the alleged plot through an informant and an undercover officer who were in touch with co-conspirators.
Last week, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, made the unorthodox move of pre-empting the Justice Department’s indictment. He heralded the F.B.I.’s work on social media on Friday, announcing that it had thwarted a potential terrorist attack in Michigan and that arrests had been made. Mr. Patel offered no further details, but later shared a Fox News article reporting that the alleged plot was connected to the Islamic State, citing unnamed sources.
The Islamic State, a self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, has been connected to a number of high-profile terror attacks, including ones directly orchestrated by members of the group and others in which radicalized people claimed to have been inspired by the group’s ideology.
In January, a man with an ISIS flag in his truck plowed into a group of New Year’s revelers on a busy street in New Orleans, killing 14. The militant group said it had inspired the attack, but did not take responsibility for it. In May, the Justice Department accused a former member of the Michigan National Guard of trying to attack a military base on behalf of the Islamic State.
The affidavit states that Mr. Ali, Mr. Mahmoud and the third person, a minor who was identified only as Person 1, had all shared extremist Islamic content and other pro-Islamic State material on their social media accounts. And it describes how, for most of this year, Person 1 was in touch with a member of the Islamic State in the Al Hol refugee camp in Syria via Instagram and WhatsApp.
The filing includes photographs of Mr. Ali and Mr. Mahmoud buying weapons and shooting them at a gun range. And it details a conversation between some of the accused co-conspirators, who discussed traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State and noted that Person 1 and Mr. Ali would stay behind so they could do the “same thing as France.”
The mention of France, the affidavit states, was most likely a reference to November 2015, when the Islamic State carried out multiple suicide bombings and mass shootings around Paris in a single night.
The affidavit does not specify whether the accused individuals and their accused co-conspirators ever settled on a target for their attack, even as they chose to time it around Halloween — using the word “pumpkin” to refer to the date. But it surmises that Person 1, Mr. Ali and Mr. Mahmoud were “scouting possible L.G.B.T.Q.+-friendly attack locations in Ferndale,” a suburb of Detroit.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
The post 2 Men Plotted Attack in Michigan on Halloween, U.S. Says appeared first on New York Times.
