COURT DOC: Al Qaeda-Trained Jihadist Who Recruited Other Inmates to Join ISIS Sentenced to 300 Months

A 46-year-old international terrorist convicted for continuing to provide support to terrorist organizations while an inmate at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has been sentenced in the Eastern District of Texas, announced U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Cox today.

Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, an Ethiopian national born in Eretria, was found guilty by a jury in December 2019, of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (ISIS) and making a false statement to the FBI. Ahmed was sentenced to an additional 300 months in federal prison today by U.S. District Judge Marcia A. Crone. This 25-year sentence will be followed by a lifetime of supervised release.

According to information presented in court, in 2013 Ahmed was convicted in the Southern District of New York of conspiring to provide material support to and receive military-type training from a foreign terrorist organization. Ahmed had attended an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1996 and was a member of the Brandbergen Mosque network, which financially and logistically supported other terrorist groups. A federal judge in New York sentenced Ahmed to 111 months in federal prison and he was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institute (FCI) in Beaumont, Texas to serve his sentence.

Ahmed continued his terrorist activities while serving his sentence at FCI-Beaumont. He recruited at least five inmates to join ISIS and to conduct terrorist acts in the United States after their release from federal custody, telling them that he was aligned with ISIS and supported al Shabaab and al Qaeda. From prison, he celebrated the Ariana Grande concert bombing and other acts of terror in the news, telling an inmate, ‘They kill kids, we gonna kill kids.’ Ahmed wanted the inmates he was recruiting to either travel abroad to join ISIS, or create sleeper cells within the United States to carry out attacks.

Ahmed provided would-be recruits with a training manual on how to carry out violent jihad, including topics such as ‘how to carry out guerilla war,’ ‘selection of human targets,’ and ‘how to carry out assassinations.’ He even held physical training exercises with other inmates in the prison yard to get them in shape to carry out the acts of terror he was plotting. Ahmed also discussed a plot with fellow inmates to bomb the Federal Detention Center in New York City as a revenge for his prosecution there. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice)