Washington (AP) -- A Somali native has been charged with plotting with other al-Qaida operatives to blow up a Columbus, Ohio-area shopping mall, according to an indictment unsealed Monday.
The four-count indictment, returned by a Columbus grand jury, charges that Nuradin Abdi, 32, conspired with admitted al-Qaida member Iyman Faris and others to detonate a bomb at the unidentified shopping mall after he obtained military-style training in Ethiopia.
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the indictment at a Justice Department news conference and used the occasion to warn anew of al-Qaida’s threat.
“Current credible intelligence indicates that al-Qaida wants to hit the United States and to hit us hard,” he said. “We know our enemies will go to great lengths to lie in wait and to achieve the death and destruction they desire.”
Abdi, who operated a cell phone business in Columbus, also is charged with fraud and misuse of documents by claiming that he had been granted valid asylum status in the United States. Prosecutors say he obtained that refugee document under false pretenses.
There also is one count each of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, in this case al-Qaida.
The charges against Abdi, who has been in custody since November on immigration-related violations, were handed up by the grand jury last Thursday.
Detroit-based U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been investigating Abdi for months prior to his Nov. 28 arrest on accusations of misrepresenting himself and misusing government documents.
He appeared before an immigration judge in Detroit on March 9 and was ordered deported, Greg Palmore, spokesman for the department’s Detroit office, said Monday.
Palmore said Abdi has been held by the agency since the March hearing.
Abdi had been in the country since at least 1999 and had been granted asylum by the immigration service after leaving his native country of Somalia, Palmore said.
Agents from the Detroit office, which is responsible for Michigan and Ohio, worked with field agents in Cincinnati on Abdi’s case.
A government motion seeking to keep Abdi in detention says he returned to the United States from Africa in March 2000 and was met at the Columbus airport by Faris. Those two and other unidentified co-conspirators were involved in the alleged shopping mall plot, prosecutors say.
Abdi was arrested on Nov. 28, the Friday after Thanksgiving and a day popularly known as “Black Friday” because it is one of the nation’s busiest shopping days. A federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said the plot was discovered through government surveillance but the official declined to give specifics.
Faris is serving a 20-year federal sentence after pleading guilty last June to providing material support to al-Qaida. Faris, an Ohio-based truck driver originally from Kashmir, admitted plotting to sever the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and to derail trains in New York or Washington.
Neither of those plots came to fruition.
Faris had received instructions from top al-Qaida leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for what might have been a second wave of attacks to follow those of Sept. 11, 2001, investigators say. Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the hijackings, is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed overseas location.
Columbus is home to more than 30,000 Somalis, the second-largest Somali community in the United States after Minneapolis. Abdi’s brother, Mohamed Abdi Karani, 17, said he had been told nothing about the case.
“I just find out whatever you find out,” he told a reporter.
One of the immigration charges contends Abdi concealed his true destination when he applied on April 27, 1999, for a U.S. travel document. He said he was going to Germany and Saudi Arabia to visit Mecca and relatives.
In fact, “as the defendant well knew, he planned to travel to Ogaden, Ethiopia, for the purpose of obtaining military-style training in preparation for violent Jihad,” the indictment says.
The training allegedly included use of guns, bombs and guerrilla warfare.
“We take these plots seriously,” said Ashcroft, but he declined to provide specifics of the allegations against Abdi, including how far along the plot was. He credited local law enforcement officials along with federal agents in foiling the plot.
Abdi is being represented by a lawyer, Ashcroft said.
Cincinnati attorney Doug Weigle said he has represented Abdi on immigration matters in the past but doesn’t know whether he will continue to represent him. He said he has been out of town and hasn’t seen any documents related to the charges the came out Monday.
Ashcroft was joined at the news conference by Asa Hutchinson, the undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security, in an apparent effort to signal improved cooperation between the two agencies.
Last month, no Homeland Security official was present when Ashcroft held a news conference to warn that al-Qaida was “90 percent” complete in its planning for an attack against America.
