Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, a 43-year-old Eritrean man sentenced to federal prison in 2013 for traveling to Somalia and fighting for Al-Shabaab, was rearrested earlier this week. At the time, he was being released from prison on charges of supporting ISIS.
That’s when new charges of attempting to provide services and support to ISIS were unsealed, according to The Examiner.
The assistant U.S. attorney for Eastern Texas asked a local court to continue to hold Ahmed upon his release from federal custody on Monday, and asked that he be held without bail by U.S. Marshals as he is a flight risk, according to the report.
The new charges include material support for terrorism and lying to investigators.
Ahmed was sentenced to 111 months in prison in March 2013 for providing material support to Al-Shabaab, the Somali terror group, and for receiving terror training from the same. He had left Sweden, where he was a legal resident, and traveled to Somalia in April 2009 to join Al-Shabaab.
According to the earlier indictment, Ahmed gave Al-Shabaab officials money, purchased weapons, and received training on making bombs. Federal prosecutors said that — while at a terror training camp near Barawa, Somalia — Ahmed was given instructions on “the preparation and/or assembly of: silver fulminate; urea nitrate; ammonium nitrate; acetone peroxide; a TNT oxidation mechanism in a nitric-sulfuric acid mixture; a bomb detonator; and different types of bomb fuses.”
Among the new charges against Ahmed is that he passed along this knowledge to other inmates. Also, Ahmed lied to investigators about the extent of his knowledge, despite the findings regarding his bomb-making skills from the earlier case.
Ahmed was captured in Nigeria in November 2009, and brought to the U.S. for trial in March 2010. At the time of his arrest, he had documents detailing bomb-making instructions.
According to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release at the time of his March 2013 sentencing, Ahmed was supposed to be deported after the conclusion of his prison term.
At his sentencing Ahmed said that he had no animosity for the United States, the New York Times reported. His attorneys filed a memorandum with the court claiming that, “[f]or Mr. Ahmed, the fight is over. He poses no threat to society, and will not re-offend.”
That apparently was not the case.
A hearing on the new charges was scheduled to occur later this week.
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