Two Michigan men have pleaded guilty this month to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS, various news outlets are reporting.
A January 7 plea agreement in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan reveals that Muse Abdikadir Muse pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in exchange for having two other charges dropped—attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization and making a false statement in a passport application.
A report from the Associated Press states that Muse’s brother, Mohamud Muse, pleaded guilty Thursday to the same charge. Mohamud Muse acknowledged that he pledged his support to ISIS in a video and planned to travel to Somalia to join the terrorist organization at some point last year.
Under the agreements, the two men face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, a lifetime of supervised release, and the possibility of losing citizenship.
The two brothers were arrested along with their cousin, Mohamed Salat Haji, last January at the Gerald Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids. Muse Muse was preparing to travel to Mogadishu where he planned to “join and fight for ISIS,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“The complaint asserts that all three defendants pledged allegiance to ISIS through videos they recorded themselves. Muse Muse and Haji allegedly discussed with each other their desire to join ISIS, kill non-believers and even to potentially use a car for a martyrdom operation to run down non-believers here in the United States if they could not travel overseas to fight for ISIS,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office explained.
All three of the men were born in Kenya. Haji is a naturalized U.S. citizen while the two brothers are derivative U.S. citizens, since they received U.S. citizenship as minors through the naturalization of their parents.
The criminal charges against Haji are still pending.
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun and The Ohio Star. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
