Federal officials arrested a Minnesota teenager on Tuesday who they say was planning a mass shooting at the Mall of America inspired by the Islamic State.
The investigation led authorities to a suburban Minneapolis parking lot, where they said Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, tried to buy weapons and ammunition from an undercover agent he thought was with the extremist group.
“Because of their vigilance and diligence, they were able to detect a threat and disrupt it before the defendant carried out his intention to kill, in his words, 30 to 60 people,” U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said during a news conference on Wednesday.
Mohamud was born in the United States to parents who are from Somalia, Rosen said. A lawyer assigned to Mohamud did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Authorities had tracked Mohamud for two years, according to court records. In electronic messages with an informant, he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and expressed a desire to earn martyrdom by committing an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, charging documents state.
Mohamud appeared before a federal magistrate judge on Wednesday and was ordered detained pending a hearing on Oct. 19. He faces federal terrorism and weapons charges.
In July, Mohamud allegedly wrote to an FBI informant in messages on Signal and TikTok that he planned to target the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The mall is one of the largest shopping centers in the world, with about 500 stores and 32 million annual visitors.
He allegedly cited the 2025 killing of more than a dozen people at a Jewish celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach as inspiration for the attack.
In later messages, Mohamud said that he had saved enough money to buy an AK-47 assault rifle and that he intended to carry out a shooting on Oct. 24, according to charging documents. He allegedly said he chose that day because the mall was hosting a Hmong arts celebration.
The informant arranged to meet Mohamud in the parking lot on Tuesday. There, the teen gave an undercover agent posing as an Islamic State member $600 in exchange for a duffel bag containing an AK-47, four magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition, court records state. Mohamud allegedly told the agent he was going to wait before returning home to make sure his mother wasn’t there.
Federal authorities said they arrested him with the weapons and ammunition. The exchange was captured on audio and video recordings, according to officials.
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