Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari must have fallen in with greasy Islamophobes; where else could he have gotten the crazy and hitherto unheard-of idea that jihad had something to do with murdering Infidels?
An update on this story. “Texas jury convicts Saudi bomb plot suspect,” by Betsy Blaney for the Associated Press, June 27 (thanks to all who sent this in):
AMARILLO, Texas (AP) – A Saudi man accused of buying chemicals online and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction was found guilty Wednesday in federal court in Amarillo.
Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, who was legally in the U.S. on a student visa, was arrested in February 2011 after federal agents secretly searched his apartment near Texas Tech University in Lubbock and found bomb-making chemicals, wiring, a hazmat suit and clocks.
Authorities also discovered Aldawsari’s journal, handwritten in Arabic, in which he wrote he’d been planning a terror attack in the U.S. for years and that it was “time for jihad,” or holy war, court documents show….
He faces up to life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 9 in Amarillo….
His attorneys claimed that because Aldawsari didn’t have a bomb made or a target pinpointed, he couldn’t have attempted to use a bomb….
He was in the early planning stages, therefore he was innocent. Got it.
Cogdell said Aldawsari was likely to appeal the verdict at some point. He described his client as “the antithesis of what you’d expect him to be.”
TNP, the chemical explosive that Aldawsari was suspected of trying to make, has approximately the same destructive power as TNT. FBI bomb experts said the amounts in the Aldawsari case would have yielded almost 15 pounds of explosives – about the same amount used per bomb in the London subway attacks that killed scores of people in July 2005.
Aldawsari entered the U.S. in October 2008 from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to study chemical engineering at Texas Tech, then transferred in early 2011 to nearby South Plains College, where he was studying business. A Saudi industrial company was paying his tuition and living expenses in the U.S….