AFP |
Washington: Authorities in the US state of Georgia have arrested a 21-year-old man who sought to buy explosives and an anti-tank rocket for a suicide attack on the White House planned for Thursday.
Byung Pak, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, announced the arrest of Hasher Taheb of Cumming, Georgia, late Wednesday after a months-long FBI investigation sparked by a tip from the local community “that Taheb had become radicalized.”
According to the indictment, Taheb tried to recruit an informant and an undercover FBI agent into a plan to attack the White House and other targets in Washington, including the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and an unnamed synagogue.
Undercover FBI agents communicated with Pitts for months on the plot before arresting him. “Pitts, a US citizen living in Ohio, pledged his allegiance to Al-Qaeda,” a Justice Department statement said.
Wanting to fulfill his “duty” and expecting to become a “martyr,” Taheb originally hoped to travel to Daesh-held territory in the Middle East, he told the FBI source, the indictment said.
But because he had lost his passport, Taheb told the informant it would be better to launch attacks inside the US. On December 7, 2018, he met the undercover agent and revealed a hand-drawn diagram of the White House West Wing, where the president’s office is located.
In the subsequent weeks, Taheb detailed what weapons he wanted to acquire for the plot, and assigned the FBI agent to obtain them: semi-automatic weapons, grenades, and an AT-4 shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapon. His plan was for the trio to jointly launch the attack on what he referred to as “game day”, eventually pinpointed as January 17.
Read more: War on jihadists won’t end unless West tackles root causes: experts
“Specifically, he described his plan to use the AT-4 to blow a hole in the White House so that the group could enter,” the indictment said. On Wednesday, the three met in the parking lot of a store in Buford, Georgia, where the FBI agent was to hand over the explosives and weapons, all of which had been rendered inert.
When Taheb took delivery of the weapons, he was arrested. Officials and the indictment provided no background on Taheb or whether he had made any contact with extremist groups abroad. But Mr. Pak said no targets in Washington or Georgia were ever truly threatened by the plot.
In a separate case, on Thursday a 49-year-old man, Demetrius Nathaniel Pitts or Abdur Raheem Rafeeq, was arrested in a Cleveland, Ohio, suburb and charged with planning a terror attack on the city on July 4, the US Independence Day holiday.
Read more: Trump insists White House a ‘smooth-running machine’
Undercover FBI agents communicated with Pitts for months on the plot before arresting him. “Pitts, a US citizen living in Ohio, pledged his allegiance to Al-Qaeda,” a Justice Department statement said.
© Agence France-Presse