During his two years working as a "research coordinator" on an H-1B visa for the Rochester, Minn., Mayo Clinic, Pakistani medical doctor Muhammad Masood allegedly saw himself as having gotten "behind enemy lines" where "not many people cant [sic] even reach here to attack."
A federal criminal complaint almost lost in the nation's Corona-19 virus crisis alleges that Masood planned from the day he arrived in America on his H-1B visa in February 2018 that he would use the rare access it afforded to learn something useful about his enemies so as to conduct violent jihad in line with his perceived religious duty. By January and
February 2020, according to the complaint, the 28-year-old was messaging on an encrypted platform about how sick he had grown of smiling every day at the "passing kuffar", a derogatory term for non-Muslims that often justifies execution. All the smiling was "just not to make them suspicios [sic] … I cannot tolerate it anymore."
He messaged that he could not let his H-1B visa go to waste. "Sometimes I wantto [sic] attack enemy when I am behind enemy linea [sic] itself," he messaged in January. "[I] wonder if I will miss the opportunity of attacking the enemy when I was in the middle of it."
By the grace of an undercover FBI investigation, Masood will do no such thing. Agents arrested Masood on March 19. By then, he had changed the plan from attacking the local kuffars he hated so much to joining ISIS in northeast Iran and Afghanistan, or in Syria as a medic, or maybe engineering drones "and also fight". It's unclear why he changed his mind about attack on U.S. soil.
"You know [brother] ... there is so much I wanted to do here ... lon wulf [sic] stuff you know ... but I realized I should be on the ground helping brothers sisters kids inshAllah," he said.
The Pakistan-licensed doctor was as deficient in operational security as he was in spelling English. The individuals on the other side of his encrypted communications were undercover informants for the FBI who kept asking if he was absolutely sure he really wanted to quit his Mayo job and join the ISIS fight overseas. "I want to kill and get killed ... and kill and get killed ... and again and again. This is what ... Allah wished," he replied.
He now stands charged with attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, the crime usually used for those hoping to join ISIS. Masood went so far as to quit his Mayo job, auction off his personal belongings, and purchase an air ticket to Jordan. But Jordan closed its borders as part of its Covid-19 lockdown strategy, so Masood decided to catch a cargo ship out of Los Angeles. FBI agents busted him in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as he went through the TSA screening line.
read more:
https://cis.org/Bensman/Pakistani-Doctor-H1B-Visa-Indicted-Jihadist-Plot
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