F.B.I. agents arrested a teenager in the Minneapolis area this week after they grew concerned that he intended to carry out a mass shooting at the Mall of America, officials said on Wednesday.
In a criminal complaint, the F.B.I. said the teenager, Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, had been under investigation for years based on messages he had exchanged with an undercover informant. In those messages, Mr. Mohamud, 18, expressed interest in traveling abroad to join the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
This past summer, Mr. Mohamud, a U.S. citizen raised by Somali parents, said that traveling overseas felt out of reach because it was too expensive.
Instead, officials said, he began plotting a mass shooting at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the largest shopping center in the country. Mr. Mohamud said he picked the mall because it is owned by Jewish people, according to the complaint.
“If I kill even 30 people,” no one would go back to the mall, he said in a text message, the complaint said.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Mohamud had retained legal representation.
The complaint says Mr. Mohamud picked a date in late October to target attendees at an Asian arts event at the mall.
On Tuesday, an F.B.I. undercover employee set up a meeting with Mr. Mohamud to sell him an AK-47 rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition near the teenager’s residence, according to the complaint.
Mr. Mohamud gave the F.B.I. official $600 to purchase the weapon. Soon after, F.B.I. agents took the teenager into custody in Richfield, a suburb of Minneapolis, officials said.
“When the F.B.I. receives credible evidence indicating someone is seeking to carry out a violent attack, we unremittingly pursue the threat to protect our communities,” Christopher D. Dotson, the bureau’s special agent in charge in Minneapolis, said in a statement.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have charged several men who traveled or planned to travel overseas to join terrorist organizations in 2014 and 2015.
Those cases generated criticism from civil rights organizations, which accused the F.B.I. of carrying out mass surveillance of Muslims. An F.B.I. agent who was critical of the tactics that he and his colleagues had been employing was prosecuted for leaking sensitive documents to the media.
Mr. Mohamud was charged with one count of purchasing a weapon with the intent to commit a crime of terrorism.
The charge demonstrates that “the threat of terrorism in support of ISIS and other foreign terrorist organizations is active and continuing,” Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, told reporters on Wednesday.
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