August 8, 2014, was a glorious summer day in Brooklyn: the sky was clear and the temperature was in the eighties. That day, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, a twenty-four-year-old man who works in a kebab shop and lives in Midwood, near Ocean Parkway, went online and surfed to an Uzbek-language Web site, Hilofatnews.com, which featured propaganda about the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIS, or ISIL. According to a criminal complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors, the site’s contents included videos and pictures of ISIS’s military operations in Iraq and Syria, recitations from the Koran, and “calls to join jihad within the ranks of ISIL.”
Juraboev is an Uzbek who moved to the United States—the complaint doesn’t say when—and acquired permanent-residency status. The complaint says that he posted this message on the Web site:
The complaint doesn’t say whether anyone replied to tell Juraboev that this would indeed do, or whether anybody replied at all. It does say that, seven days later, on August 15th, federal agents went to Juraboev’s apartment and spoke with him. According to Ryan Singer, an F.B.I. special agent who swore the complaint, Juraboev coöperated freely, allowing the agents to inspect his iPhone and see that Hilofatnews.com was a frequently visited site. He “acknowledged that he wrote and posted” the message on August 8th, and “further stated that he would like to travel to Syria to engage in violence on behalf of ISIL, ‘if Allah will,’ but currently lacked the means to travel there.” Juraboev went on to say that he “would harm President Barack Obama if he had the opportunity to do so, but currently does not have the means or an imminent plan to do so.”
Four days later, the federal agents returned. This time, Juraboev was even more helpful, or so the complaint indicates. After repeating that he would kill President Obama if anybody from ISIS ordered him to, he said that he would also plant a car bomb in Coney Island, “if he were so ordered by ISIL.” In addition, he provided the agents with a written statement that said, in part, “If I get a command from the Islamic Caliphate that is according to Quran ... and I have the means to carry out the given command and if I can make my intention only for Allah ... I will carry out! Even if that person is Obama!” Juraboev didn’t stop there. He vouchsafed to the agents that he had a friend and roommate, Akhror Saidakhmetov, who shared both his views on ISIS and “his wish to wage jihad by fighting in Syria or by engaging in violence in the United States.”
It’s not every day that F.B.I. agents get a written note from someone saying that he’s waiting for an order to kill the President or plant a car bomb, and that he has a pal who is of like mind. The agents could have arrested Juraboev on the spot, put him under oath, and sought to discover whether he was a real threat or simply a braggart. Instead, they went away again, which, evidently, surprised Juraboev. On August 26th, he had an online conversation with the Iraqi-based administrator of another Web site linked to ISIS, Islamic State News, which disseminates news and propaganda. After informing his interlocutor that he had told the F.B.I. that he was willing to assassinate Obama, Juraboev said, “Even after these words, they left me alone. Why? Because they think I am establishing a Jihadi group, or I belong to such group. ... What should I do? I need to sneak out of here with extreme caution without being noticed by them.”
Based on the complaint, there is no evidence that Juraboev and his friend, Saidakhmetov, a nineteen-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, who worked for a company that operates cell-phone-repair and kitchenware-sales kiosks in shopping malls, were part of any larger group, or that they went anywhere near the President. Like many of ISIS’s recruits, their jihadism, if that is what it was, consisted of going online; complaining about other Muslims, including some of their family members, who didn’t adhere to strict religious rituals; and talking about flying to Syria.
A few days after last Christmas, Juraboev bought a return airplane ticket to Istanbul, departing March 29th, with the evident intention of going overland to Syria. In February, Saidakhmetov purchased a ticket for the same route, and his thirty-year-old boss, Abror Habibov, who owned kiosks in several states, picked up some of the cost. All three of the men were arrested and charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. If they are found guilty, they face up to fifteen years each in jail.
It all seems depressingly straightforward, and depressingly similar to stories emanating from Britain, France, and other countries whence ISIS’s foreign fighters hail. Except for one thing: in this case, the would-be ISIS recruits were assisted and encouraged in their plans by a paid F.B.I. informant.
According to the complaint, this individual, who isn’t named, approached Juraboev at a mosque last September “while posing as an ideologically sympathetic individual.” Shortly after that date, he approached Saidakhmetov and became friendly with him, too. Over the subsequent few months, the narrative contained in the complaint makes clear, the informant spoke frequently with Juraboev and Saidakhmetov, watched ISIS videos with them, discussed their plans to join ISIS in Syria, and even agreed to go there with them. Many of his conversations with Juraboev and Saidakhmetov were secretly recorded.
On January 9th, the complaint says, the informant agreed to forge Saidakhmetov’s signature on a new travel document. (His mother, fearful that he was thinking of joining ISIS, had confiscated the original one.) A few weeks later, on January 29th, the informant called Saidakhmetov and told him that his travel documents had arrived, but that he’d have to go to the immigration office on Varick Street, in Manhattan, to have his fingerprints and photo taken. This he did a few days later.
By this stage, it seems, Saidakhmetov was planning to travel to Syria with the confidential informant. On February 17th, when the completed travel document arrived from the Department of Homeland Security, Saidakhmetov “told the CI that his soul was already on its way to paradise and made the sound of a horn.” The next day, the complaint goes on, Saidakhmetov told the informant that “he would purchase a ticket to travel on February 25, 2015, so that he could travel together with the CI.” A day later, Saidakhmetov and Habibov purchased a ticket for Saidakhmetov at a travel agency on Coney Island Avenue. Now looking forward to the trip, he “told the CI that if they were detected at the airport they could kill a police officer and use the officer’s gun to shoot other law enforcement officers that arrived on the scene, which would mean that Saidakhmetov and the CI would die an imminent death within an hour or less.”
From the complaint, it isn’t clear what role, if any, the informant played in shaping Juraboev’s plans. But he wasn’t uninvolved. On December 29th, Juraboev told the informant that he had bought his ticket to Istanbul the previous day, and said that his cover story would be that he was traveling to Uzbekistan to see relations. In a subsequent phone conversation, Juraboev, after indicating that he was speaking in code, “told Saidakhmetov he was traveling to Uzbekistan on March 29, 2015.” The complaint then goes on to say that the informant, who was also on the phone call, “stated that the CI was similarly traveling on March 31, 2015.”
It is possible to look at these conversations in different ways. One interpretation is that Juraboev and Saidakhmetov were radicalized jihadis who acted of their own accord. Another possible interpretation, which the defense may well seek to bring up at a trial, is that until the F.B.I. informant entered their lives and helped them plan a trip to Syria, saying he would go with them, the two Brooklynites were all bluster. The case “highlights everything that is wrong in how the Justice Department approaches these cases,” Adam D. Perlmutter, a lawyer for Saidakhmetov, said on Wednesday. His client had been “worked over extensively by a confidential informant,” Perlmutter added, and went on, ”He’s a kid. He’s obviously scared. He’s frightened. The ham-fisted tactics of the federal government are in play here, as usual.”
Obviously, Perlmutter isn't a neutral participant in all this. But when you read about the case, and others involving paid informants, it makes you think.
