Cholo Abdi Abdullah Convicted For Conspiring To Commit 9/11-Style Attack At The Direction Of Al Shabaab

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that a jury returned a guilty verdict against CHOLO ABDI ABDULLAH on all six counts in the Indictment, which included conspiring to provide, and providing, material support to a foreign terrorist organization; and conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, commit aircraft piracy, destroy aircraft, and commit transnational acts of terrorism. ABDULLAH is scheduled to be sentenced on March 10, 2025.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: "Today, the jury returned a unanimous verdict holding Cholo Abdi Abdullah responsible for trying to replicate one of history's most heinous acts of terrorism. Abdullah trained with al Shabaab for months in Somalia to become a deadly terrorist, and then spent months at flight school preparing to hijack a commercial aircraft to crash it into a building in the United States. Abdullah relentlessly pursued his goals and was on the cusp of getting a commercial pilot license while conducting extensive attack planning, such as how to breach an airplane cockpit door. I commend the tireless work of our federal law enforcement partners and the career national security prosecutors of this Office. This effort has been carried forward by generations of agents and prosecutors who never relented in their effort to bring Abdullah to justice and keep this nation safe. Thanks to their work and today's verdict, Abdullah will now serve a lengthy sentence in federal prison."

As reflected in the Indictment and the evidence presented at trial:

ABDULLAH was an operative for the foreign terrorist organization Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mijahideen, commonly known as "al Shabaab," based in Somalia. After training with al Shabaab for months with AK-47 assault rifles and explosives at a series of safe houses in Somalia, ABDULLAH participated in a plot to hijack a commercial aircraft and crash it into a building in the U.S. He spent months at a flight school in the Philippines working toward a commercial pilot license, and researched how to obtain pilot jobs, targets such as the tallest buildings in a major American city, transit visas to the U.S., and how to open a cockpit door from the outside. ABDULLAH also sent encrypted messages reporting his progress to his al Shabaab handler, including his extensive research on post-September 11th hijackings.

ABDULLAH conspired to commit this attack on behalf Al Shabaab, which has sworn allegiance to al Qaeda and is responsible for numerous deadly terrorist attacks, including attacks that have claimed American lives. Starting in or about 2019, al Shabaab embarked on a string of terrorist attacks as part of an operation in response to the U.S.'s decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which the group has dubbed "Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized." In particular, these terrorist attacks perpetrated by al Shabaab included an attack on January 15, 2019 at a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 21 people, including a U.S. national and survivor of al Qaeda's 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, New York; a September 30, 2019 attack on a U.S. military facility in Somalia; and a January 5, 2020, attack on another U.S. facility in Kenya, in which three Americans were killed.

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ABDULLAH, 34, was convicted on six counts: conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum term of 20 years in prison; providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum term of 20 years in prison; conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, which carries a maximum term of life in prison; conspiring to commit aircraft piracy, which carries a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum term of life in prison; conspiring to destroy aircraft, which carries a maximum term of 20 years in prison; and conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Mr. Williams praised the outstanding efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's ("FBI") New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which principally consists of agents from the FBI and detectives from the New York City Police Department ("NYPD"). Mr. Williams also thanked the FBI Legal Attaché Offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Manila, the Philippines; the FBI's Hudson Valley Resident Agency; the New York State Police; the Counterterrorism Section of the Department of Justice's National Security Division; the Office of International Affairs of the Department of Justice's Criminal Division; the U.S. Department of Defense; the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations, including the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit and the Joint Terrorism Task Force-Kenya; the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Kenya; the Philippine National Police; the Philippine Department of Justice; the Joint Terrorism Financial Investigations Group-Philippines; and the Philippine Bureau of Immigration, for their assistance.

This case is being handled by the Office's National Security and International Narcotics Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas S. Bradley and Jonathan L. Bodansky are in charge of the prosecution, with assistance from paralegal specialist Sabrina Jim Munoz and trial attorney John Cella of the Counterterrorism Section of the National Security Division.