>
> March 10, 2025
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>
>
>
> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/cholo-abdi-abdullah-convicted-conspiring-commit-911-style-attack-direction-al-shabaab
>
>
> A jury returned a guilty verdict today against Cholo Abdi Abdullah, 34, on
> all six counts in the indictment, which included conspiring to provide, and
> providing, material support to a foreign terrorist organization; and
> conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, commit aircraft piracy, destroy
> aircraft, and commit transnational acts of terrorism. Abdullah is scheduled
> to be sentenced on March 10, 2025.
>
> “The jury found that Cholo Abdi Abdullah, an operative of the terrorist
> organization al Shabaab, conspired to murder Americans in a terrorist
> attack reminiscent of the September 11 attack on our country,” said
> Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Today’s conviction ensures that
> Abdullah will spend decades in prison for his crimes. The Justice
> Department will never stop working to identify, investigate, and prosecute
> those who would use heinous acts of violence to harm the American people.
> It does not matter where terrorists hide, they will not evade the long arm
> of the law.”
>
> “Today, the jury returned a unanimous verdict holding Cholo Abdi Abdullah
> responsible for trying to replicate one of history’s most heinous acts of
> terrorism,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of
> New York. “Abdullah trained with al Shabaab for months in Somalia to become
> a deadly terrorist, and then spent months at flight school preparing to
> hijack a commercial aircraft to crash it into a building in the United
> States. Abdullah relentlessly pursued his goals and was on the cusp of
> getting a commercial pilot license while conducting extensive attack
> planning, such as how to breach an airplane cockpit door. I commend the
> tireless work of our federal law enforcement partners and the career
> national security prosecutors of this office. This effort has been carried
> forward by generations of agents and prosecutors who never relented in
> their effort to bring Abdullah to justice and keep this nation safe. Thanks
> to their work and today’s verdict, Abdullah will now serve a lengthy
> sentence in federal prison.”
>
> According to the indictment and the evidence presented at trial, Abdullah
> was an operative for the foreign terrorist organization Harakat al-Shabaab
> al-Mijahideen, commonly known as “al Shabaab,” based in Somalia. After
> training with al Shabaab for months with AK-47 assault rifles and
> explosives at a series of safe houses in Somalia, Abdullah participated in
> a plot to hijack a commercial aircraft and crash it into a building in the
> U.S. He spent months at a flight school in the Philippines working toward a
> commercial pilot license, and researched how to obtain pilot jobs, targets
> such as the tallest buildings in a major American city, transit visas to
> the U.S., and how to open a cockpit door from the outside. Abdullah also
> sent encrypted messages reporting his progress to his al Shabaab handler,
> including his extensive research on post-September 11 hijackings.
>
> Abdullah conspired to commit this attack on behalf Al Shabaab, which has
> sworn allegiance to al Qaeda and is responsible for numerous deadly
> terrorist attacks, including attacks that have claimed American lives.
> Starting in or about 2019, al Shabaab embarked on a string of terrorist
> attacks as part of an operation in response to the U.S.’s decision to move
> its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which the group has dubbed “Operation
> Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized.” In particular, these terrorist attacks
> perpetrated by al Shabaab included an attack on Jan. 15, 2019, at a hotel
> in Nairobi, Kenya, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 21 people,
> including a U.S. national and survivor of al Qaeda’s September 11 attack on
> the World Trade Center in New York; a Sept. 30, 2019, attack on a U.S.
> military facility in Somalia; and a Jan. 5, 2020, attack on another U.S.
> facility in Kenya, in which three Americans were killed.
>
> Abdullah was convicted on six counts: conspiring to provide material
> support to a foreign terrorist organization, for which he faces a maximum
> penalty of 20 years in prison; providing material support to a foreign
> terrorist organization, for which he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in
> prison; conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, for which he faces a maximum
> penalty of life in prison; conspiring to commit aircraft piracy, for which
> he faces a mandatory minimum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum
> penalty of life in prison; conspiring to destroy aircraft, for which he
> faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; and conspiring to commit
> acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, for which he faces a
> maximum penalty of life in prison.
>
> The FBI New York Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated
> the case.
>
> The Justice Department also thanks the FBI Legal Attaché Offices in
> Nairobi, Kenya, and Manila, Philippines; the FBI’s Hudson Valley Resident
> Agency; the Office of International Affairs of the Department of Justice’s
> Criminal Division; the U.S. Department of Defense; the Kenyan Directorate
> of Criminal Investigations, including the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit and
> the Joint Terrorism Task Force-Kenya; the Office of the Director of Public
> Prosecutions in Kenya; the Philippine National Police; the Philippine
> Department of Justice; the Joint Terrorism Financial Investigations
> Group-Philippines; and the Philippine Bureau of Immigration, for their
> assistance.
>
> Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas S. Bradley and Jonathan L. Bodansky for
> the Southern District of New York and Trial Attorney John Cella of the
> National Security Division's Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting the
> case.
>
