If only he had seen Hamas-linked CAIR’s bus ads! Then he’d have been hitting the gym instead of plotting jihad mass murder.
“18-year sentence in “˜a classic crime of terrorism,'” by Levi Pulkkinen for seattlepi.com, March 25:
A SeaTac man whose plans to wage “jihad” against a South Seattle military office were derailed by a child-molesting friend was sentenced to 18 years in prison Monday.
Having admitted to planning the terrorist attack in June 2011, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif also faces 10 years of supervised release.
Abdul-Latif, 35, was nabbed after a sex offender he tried to recruit went to police; he was arrested in a sting operation before he could attack the Military Entrance Processing Station, an induction center where young recruits to all military branches take their oaths and are sent to basic training.
The would-be terrorist planned to storm the East Marginal Way South center alongside Los Angeles resident Walli Mujahidh and the informant. Once inside, they were to open fire with automatic weapons and grenades on the Department of Defense workers and new recruits headed to basic training in the hope of killing as many as possible before being killed or captured.
Mujahidh pleaded guilty shortly after his arrest and is scheduled to be sentenced later in the year. Abdul-Latif’s guilty plea came in December, as his attorneys and prosecutors were preparing to argue over the improper destruction of hundreds of text messages exchanged between the informant and his Seattle Police Department handler.
The unlikely hero in the federal prosecution was a Seattle rapist who went to police after Abdul-Latif approached him about the attack. The man ultimately spent weeks working with police and recording conversations with the conspirators, and was paid about $90,000 for the work.
Abdul-Latif pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder government employees and to use weapons of mass destruction. He was sentenced Monday morning by U.S. District Judge James Robart at the federal courthouse in Seattle.
Attorneys for Abdul-Latif describe him as a mentally ill man who never would have gotten so close to attacking the center if not for pressure from the informant. Prosecutors say Abdul-Latif was well on his way before the informant got involved and maintained control of the plot until his arrest.
In Youtube videos and discussions recorded by the informant, Abdul-Latif discussed his outrage at what he viewed as American abuses in the Muslim world. The attack on the Seattle facility was meant to spark other attacks elsewhere, Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said in court documents.
“Abdul-Latif did not intend to engage in a random mass killing — he wanted to kill specific victims in order to send a political message,” wrote Greenberg, who prosecuted the case alongside Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Dion.
“This was a classic crime of terrorism,” he continued in a sentencing memo.
Ex-con aspired to “˜physical jihad”
Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were arrested June 22, 2011, three weeks after the informant went to Seattle police and claimed Abdul-Latif was scheming to kill Western Washington soldiers. The informant contacted Seattle detectives on June 3, 2011, and said he”d met with Abdul-Latif four days prior. He then began to divulge details of the purported plot.
On May 30, 2011, the informant dined with Abdul-Latif and his family. The informant — a registered sex offender previously convicted of child molestation and rape — told police Abdul-Latif first proposed an attack on Joint Base Lewis-McChord during that dinner.
The men met several years before. Like Abdul-Latif, a failed janitor and ex-con, the informant adopted a Muslim name in recent years. It is currently listed as an alias on his sex offender registration.
According to charging documents, though, the informant did not share Abdul-Latif’s views or desire to turn to violence.
“Abdul-Latif said that ‘jihad’ in America should be a ‘physical jihad,’ and not just ‘media jihad,’ expressing his view that it was necessary to take action rather than just talk,” an FBI special agent told the court. “Abdul-Latif referred to the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, when a single gunman killed 13 people … (and) said that if one person could kill so many people, three attackers could kill many more.”…