Tuesday, July 5, 2016

African Muslim crime: A former National Guard soldier in Virginia has been arrested and charged with attempting to plan a terrorist attack in the United States with the help of ISIS

The African Muslim, 26-year-old Mohamed Jalloh, a US citizen from Sierra Leone, joined the Army National Guard in 2009; he was honorably discharged in 2015. He quit after hearing a lecture from a radical Muslim cleric. The FBI believes that Jalloh first made contact with ISIS during a trip to West Africa in 2015. An investigation into Jalloh started in March 2016 after an ISIS member introduced Jalloh to a government informant posing as an ISIS operative. That ISIS member, now dead, was planning an attack in the United States and believed that Jalloh and the informant would help. In April 2016, Jalloh told the informant that he was thinking about conducting an attack similar to the one on Fort Hood in 2009, saying that he wanted to do a "Nidal Hasan type of thing." Officials say that same month he was asked by ISIS if he wanted to take part in an attack and responded, "I really want to." "Sometimes you just have to take action," Jalloh said during a recorded conversation. In May 2016, Jalloh told the informant that he wanted to plan an attack for Ramadan and tried to send $500 to ISIS. He was seen buying an assault rifle (the gun was disabled before it left the store). Jalloh's arrest was the culmination of a three-month sting. He's facing 20 years in prison if convicted.

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