A Kenyan citizen associated with the extremist group al-Shabaab has been sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA after being found guilty of plotting a terrorist attack after the September 11 incident.
A federal judge in New York imposed the severe punishment after the prosecution produced the evidence showing that the defendant had undergone training and had a plan to seize a commercial airplane with the purpose of crashing it into a building on American soil, resulting in a large number of deaths.
As the U.S. Department of Justice reported, the man convicted—whose name is Cholo Abdi Abdullah—had allied with the militant group in Somalia, had gone through military training, and then had passed the flight school in the Philippines.
Prosecutors clarified that Abdullah, during his pilot training, not only researched how to hijack a plane but also where to hit it in the U.S. so as to cause maximum impact, thereby indicating he was in fact preparing to repeat the 2001 attacks that shook the world community.
A jury verdict in late 2024 on several counts—such as the provision of material support to a terrorist organization, conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens, aircraft piracy, and transnational terrorism—resulted in this sentence.
Authorities in the U.S. commended the cooperation between various law enforcement agencies that not only detected the conspiracy but also arrested the perpetrator, noting that the sentence is a serious warning to terrorists aiming at spreading violence in foreign countries.
Leave a Reply