A 22-year-old New York man was arrested this week after an FBI investigation into his attempts to join ISIS revealed he had retweeted messages from the terrorist organization, Gizmodo reported.
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Abdurahman pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to provide support and resources to a terrorist organization.
The complaint says Saleh, whose family is from Yemen, was unable to travel at that time, but did not give up his efforts.
Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman spent the next hour answering questions, naming co-conspirators and detailing how a group of men from Minneapolis were recruited to join ISIS in Syria.
Saleh then made his way to an Amtrak station in Cleveland in an attempt to take a train to Toronto and travel to the Middle East from there.
Ali Saleh, 22, was arrested in the Jamaica section of Queens Thursday morning and appeared in federal court in Brooklyn Thursday afternoon.
“Lets be clear the Muslims in the khilafah (caliphate) need help, the one who is capable to go over and help the Muslims must go and help”, Saleh posted on a Twitter account investigators believe he controlled in August, when he booked a reservation to Turkey, a common point of entry to Syria, according to a criminal complaint. Prosecutors say that Saleh also used Twitter to communicate his travel plans with an “unidentified coconspirator”.
There’s no suggestion that he was plotting attacks in the U.S. Over the span of the next two days, Saleh subsequently continued his attempts to travel to the Middle East by visiting Newark Liberty worldwide Airport in New Jersey and Philadelphia global Airport, where he was again denied boarding.
In the criminal complaint, FBI Special Agent Bret C. Luhmann wrote that Saleh told investigators in interviews before his arrest that he developed an interest in the Islamic State group and the war in Syria in 2013 and had sworn an oath of allegiance to the group. “We will continue to be vigilant in our attempts to proactively stop threats before harm can occur”.
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Police Commissioner William Bratton credited the Joint Terrorism Task Force for developing solid intelligence that uncovered Saleh.
