An Afghan man accused of planning an Election Day attack in the US pleads guilty
An Afghan man in Oklahoma accused of planning an Election Day attack in the U.S. on behalf of the Islamic State group pleaded guilty Friday to terrorism-related charges in federal court.
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, pleaded guilty to two offenses: conspiring and providing support to the Islamic State group, and attempting to receive firearms to commit a federal crime of terrorism. The Islamic State is designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization.
Tawhedi faces up to 35 years in prison.
'The defendant admits he planned and obtained firearms to carry out a violent terror attack on Election Day in 2024, a plot that was detected and disrupted through the good work of the FBI and our partners,' FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement.
A phone message was left seeking comment from Craig Hoehns, an attorney for Tawhedi.
Tawhedi was living in Oklahoma City last year when he acquired two AK-47-style rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition to target large crowds, according to court documents. Authorities said he had conspired with multiple people, including his brother-in-law, Abdullah Haji Zada, for several months to plot out the attack.
Zada, who was 17 at the time, was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty in April. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Tawhedi arrived in the U.S. in September 2021 on a special immigration visa shortly after the capital city of Afghanistan, Kabul, was captured by the Taliban. At the time of his arrest on Oct. 7, Tawhedi was on parole while his immigration status was pending, according to the Justice Department. His parole status has since been revoked.
FBI agents had testified earlier that Tawhedi, who worked as a rideshare driver and at auto shops, was under surveillance for more than a month before his arrest.
___
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Dumb and Dumber To or Idiocracy? What to watch instead of Trump's big boy birthday party
What are you up to this weekend? If you're American, then there's only one right answer to the question: celebrating the 79th birthday of our lord and saviour, Donald John Trump. As you will know, and already have marked in your calendar, there's a big military parade happening in Washington DC on Saturday 14 June. Nominally this is to mark the US army's 250th anniversary, but thanks to the machinations of time and space it happens to fall on Trump's birthday: the parade has been widely branded as a big boy birthday party for the president. If you can't get to DC to physically watch Trump's parade then I'm sure you're desperate to watch it on TV. ABC News, which recently dropped its correspondent Terry Moran for a social media post calling Stephen Miller, the Trump administration deputy chief of staff a 'world class hater', plans to cover the parade across programs and platforms, beginning 6pm on Saturday. Networks such as CBS and NBC seem to have relegated coverage to their streaming channels. Fox and NewsNation, meanwhile, will be going all out for dear leader's celebrations. Which will be lavish: the event is costing as much as $45m, not including all the damage that military vehicles are going to do to the roads in DC. And the best part of all this? You, the taxpayer, are footing the bill! Who needs money for schools and infrastructure, eh? We the people want to see big tanks, goose-stepping soldiers and missiles that go boom. In the event that you, in fact, do not want to see these things then I do have some alternatives for you. Please find below a helpful list of things to watch on Saturday other than Trump's birthday parade. As I'm a little brown woman on a green card I'd like to make very clear that I am not encouraging you to snub Trump. Nope, all of the below are their own sort of homage to the man we are so lucky to have as president. Ulrich Mühe's Oscar-winning drama is set in East Berlin in the 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Capt Gerd Wiesler is a Stasi (secret police) officer who is initially loyal to the regime until he starts to empathize with the people he spies on. Wiesler must choose between loyalty to an oppressive regime and being a good person. Eventually he chooses the latter. The movie reportedly had some real-life consequences. In 2014, 43 Israeli intelligence veterans refused to serve in Palestinian territories because of the widespread surveillance of innocent residents. According to the New York Times, one of the Israeli captains had a moral awakening after watching The Lives of Others. 'I felt a lot of sympathy for the victims in the film of the intelligence,' the captain said. 'But I did feel a weird, confusing sense of similarity, I identified myself with the intelligence workers. That we were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes really was a deep realization that makes us all feel that we have to take responsibility.' Much like Trump 2.0, this Jim Carrey romp is a terrible sequel that should never have happened. There is a meandering plot involving a kidney transplant and a pork chop but the real drama here actually comes from how the film was made. From 2009 to 2015, more than $4.5bn was 'misappropriated' from a Malaysian government fund and laundered in various ways across the world. In 2016 and 2017 the justice department claimed millions of dollars from that fund were funneled to a production company to make The Wolf of Wall Street, Dumb and Dumber To and Daddy's Home. Now that 'daddy' Trump (as Tucker Carlson likes to call him) is home in the White House, it looks like money laundering is going to be made great again. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's policy blueprint for Trump's second term, calls for Congress to 'repeal the Corporate Transparency Act', which makes money laundering harder by requiring limited liability companies to disclose their owners. Asif Kapadia's drama-doc takes place in (you guessed it!) 2073, 37 years after 'The Event', which is an unspecified disaster that changed the world. The film opens with dystopian footage from Gaza with the chilling insinuation that soon everywhere will look like Gaza; soon all of us will be treated like Palestinians. Trumps loom large in 2073: it features Ivanka Trump celebrating her 30th year ruling over a dystopian police state. 'That [sequence] where Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year in power is there because the idea of a two-term American presidency, I don't think, will be around forever,' Kapaida told Variety. Big military parades, however? Those might be around forever even if we're all living in bunkers or (as is the case in 2073), the ruins of shopping malls and trying to dodge drones trying to detect everyone undesirable to the state. A bunch of middle-aged friends go on a camping trip and are murdered by a disillusioned door-to-door orange salesman whose weapon of choice is his prosthetic hook and a bag of oranges. I know it sounds ludicrous but suspend your disbelief. We live in ludicrous times. This dystopian thriller is set in 2027 when decades of pollution-induced human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. '[W]hat would happen to us all, psychologically, if the end of the world was at hand?' the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw asked in a review of the film. '[One character says] that he personally gets by from day to day by simply not thinking about what is happening, and his stunned, bleak acquiescence in the creeping horror of global death is symptomatic of the vast spiritual sterility which ushered in the catastrophe in the first place.' If that sounds bleak then the good news is that, come 2026, we might get a remake called Children of Musk where humanity is saved by Elon Musk donating his sperm to everyone and sending all his kids to Mars. This documentary on El Salvador's civil war is available on a number of platforms. Probably good for people in the US to know a thing or two about the country in case you end up getting shipped there. Stanley Kubrick's famous satire deals with a mad-dog American general called Jack Ripper who goes rogue and initiates a nuclear attack ('Wing Attack Plan R') on the Soviet Union. (Like many people in the Trump administration, by the way, General Ripper is absolutely obsessed with fluoride, believing it to be part of a communist conspiracy to '[pollute] our precious bodily fluids'.) An ineffectual president called Merkin Muffley convenes a crisis meeting to try and stop a doomsday scenario. I won't tell you how it ends. But I will say that you should probably just stop worrying and learn to love all of Trump's big, beautiful bombs. In Mike Judge's anti-corporation cult hit, the meek don't inherit the earth, the morons do. An average Joe called Joe is placed in hibernation via a US army experiment and wakes up in 2505 where the most popular show on The Violence Channel is called Ow, My Balls! and everyone is … how do you say in English? ... unintelligent. In a 2017 interview, Terry Crews, who played President Camacho in the film, called it 'so prophetic in so many ways it actually scares people'. And its Urban Dictionary entry reads: 'A movie that was originally a comedy, but became a documentary.' Elon Musk, meanwhile, has shared the opening scene to try and scare intelligent-identifying people into having kids. Perhaps Musk has watched the film too many times, however, because he appears to have morphed into one of his characters. When the billionaire, sporting sunglasses indoors, theatrically wielded a chainsaw at CPAC earlier this year it drew numerous comparisons to President Camacho's machine-gun-waving showmanship in the movie. And that showmanship, of course, will be nothing compared to the big guns at Trump's birthday parade. Goodbye the rule of law and a government of the people; hello dumbocracy.
The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Grilled cheese shop offers Minnesotans a second chance after prison
All Square, a neon-lit diner in Minneapolis, specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches with a twist. Variations on the menu include Jamaican jerk chicken with guava jam, brown sugar bacon doused in ranch dressing, and Granny Smith apple slices coated in brie and mozzarella. But the sandwich shop offers more than elevated comfort food. All Square, which also operates a food-truck catering service, exclusively hires formerly incarcerated Minnesotans. 'It started with the idea of: how do we respond to this systemic issue of excluding formerly incarcerated folks from, well, everything once we welcome them home?' said Emily Hunt Turner, a civil rights lawyer who founded the restaurant in 2018. The name All Square refers to the shape of the grilled cheese sandwich as well as the idea that those who served their time deserve a chance to restart their lives with a clean slate. Hunt Turner, 41, said she built the menu around grilled cheese in part because the relatively low overhead allows her to focus on her true mission: supporting people coming home from prison. Each year, Hunt Turner and her team hire five full-time fellows who were recently released from prison. Over the next year, those workers cook, clean and serve tables, earning up to $23 per hour, including tips. When they're not working at the restaurant, the fellows have access to a host of services, including therapy and workshops aimed at helping them launch their own businesses. Taqee Abdul-Hakim, a fellow from the 2022 class, began working at the restaurant just one month after he was released from prison. He said the free therapy sessions helped clear his mind and dream bigger. The weekly paychecks allowed him to find an apartment and provide for his two young children, even enrolling one in gymnastics. Just as importantly, he said, flipping sandwiches with other formerly incarcerated people helped him stay out of trouble. 'I needed to reshape my friend group after I got out,' Abdul-Hakim said. 'At All Square, it was nice to have those types of friends who are in the same position as me, who have been through it but trying to better our lives at the same time.' All Square is part of a broader social enterprise of the same name. The non-profit, which has 25 employees and a $3m annual operating budget, also runs a law firm that provides services to justice-impacted Minnesotans and helps incarcerated people train in the law. Hunt Turner founded All Square after working as an attorney for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she saw first-hand how difficult it was for people with criminal histories to access housing. 'We were getting complaints from all over the country where folks were saying they're being discriminated against on the basis of having a criminal record,' she said. 'This kind of perpetual punishment is not something we can turn away from.' An estimated 70 million Americans, about one in three adults, has an arrest or conviction on their record. They face high rates of homelessness and steep barriers to employment. One in three formerly incarcerated people is unemployed, according to federal statistics, and being without a job doubles the odds of returning to prison. 'We heard a lot from fellows that outstanding debt – child support arrears, student loan debt, traffic citations – can be such a barrier to starting over,' Turner said. 'So we established a debt-alleviation fund that dispenses up to $2,000 in debt relief as they transition to the next chapter of their lives.' To build the restaurant, Turner raised $250,000 from a Kickstarter campaign and a Minneapolis Foundation grant; she also sold a few dozen $1,000 memberships to the 'Grilled Cheese for Life' club. Revenues from the restaurant support the organization's other operations. 'The magic ingredient of All Square is that it's not dependent on fundraising or donors,' said Bruce Reilly, a founding board member of the organization and an advocate for the formerly incarcerated. 'People might not write you a $1,000 check, but they might come buy a sandwich every day for the next 10 years.' The sandwiches are a hit, but some local groups question whether All Square is the best vehicle to support the Black and brown communities that are disproportionately involved with the justice system. 'Because it's not founded or directed by justice-impacted people, it's not equipped to help our community through re-entry,' said Kevin Reese, co-founder and co-executive director of the local organization Until We Are All Free. Turner said the issue of representation and privilege is something the organization wrestles with constantly as it expands in size and ambition. 'From our perspective, broad-based support and allyship are vital to forging social movements,' she said. The program has graduated 56 fellows and provided $130,000 in debt relief and seed capital, Turner said. Graduates have gone on to launch a coffee importer and a custom grills shop, among other enterprises. Abdul-Hakim, the 2022 fellow, used a $10,000 seed capital grant from All Square to launch a towing company, Mow-Tow. In addition to earning a living wage at the restaurant, he said the fellowship taught him how to create a business plan and build up his credit. 'If I didn't come across All Square, to be honest, I don't think I'd be down the path I'm on now,' he said.
The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
EPA drops case against prison company that has donated heavily to Trump
The Donald Trump administration has dropped up to $4m in potential fines against the private prison operator Geo Group over the latter's use of a toxic disinfectant in a detention center that allegedly put employees' and detainees' health at risk. The administration made the move after Geo donated over $4m to the president and Republican leadership, as well as Trump's inauguration fund. Geo is a key piece of the administration's immigration crackdown, and the federal government has paid it billions of dollars to hold US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. The company faced fines of up to about $3,550 for each of its approximately 1,100 violations for failing to provide its workers with protection from a toxic disinfectant heavily sprayed at its Adelanto, California, immigration facility in 2022-2023. The US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Justice changing course after the election is 'highly unusual', Gary Jonesi, a former EPA enforcement manager who retired earlier this year, told the Guardian. He called it a 'complete surrender'. 'If this is not due to political intervention on behalf of an early and large Trump donor who stands to gain from managing Ice detention facilities and private prisons, then surely it is at least partly due to the intimidation that career staff feel in an environment when federal employees are being fired and reassigned to undesirable tasks and locations,' Jonesi said. In an email, the EPA said: 'As a matter of longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on litigation.' Geo said: 'The case was dismissed with prejudice because the allegations were completely baseless and without merit.' 'GEO's COVID safety protocols at the Adelanto Facility focused on cleanliness and health, successfully protecting the lives of thousands of detainees in our care,' a spokesperson added. The disinfectant, called Halt, includes an EPA warning stating: 'Causes irreversible eye damage and skin burns. Harmful if swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Do not get in eyes, on skin, or on clothing.' Among its ingredients are quats, a chemical class that's under increased scrutiny for links to infertility, birth defects, hormone disruption, asthma and skin disorders. It also includes tetrasodium EDTA, a chemical made from formaldehyde and sodium cyanide. A separate civil lawsuit alleges Geo sickened inmates with its indiscriminate spraying of a similar disinfectant, HDQ Neutral, with most of the same ingredients. That is playing out in federal court, and plaintiffs allege, among other issues, the disinfectant causes blood clots in their lungs, nosebleeds, dizziness and headaches. The suit alleges staff sprayed the substance throughout the prison, 'including the front lobby, administrative areas, living areas, food and microwave areas, day room, corridors, intake units, and medical units. In the living areas, GEO staff would spray onto all surfaces including on soft, porous surfaces like mattresses and sheets'. The suit also alleges the substance got in detainees' food, and in one instance staff sprayed a detainee as punishment. EPA records show the agency cited Geo in March 2021, at which time it was using HDQ Neutral. It switched to Halt and continued spraying through early 2023. Geo fought the charges in administrative law court beginning in June 2024. The disinfectant is regulated under US pesticide laws, which require the use of goggles or a face shield, chemical-resistant gloves and protective clothing. Geo provided gloves for its staff, but the EPA noted the nitrile gloves' box stated that they were 'extra soft' and 'not intended for use as a general chemical barrier'. Geo argued that the gloves were sufficient for the chemicals in the disinfectant. If the two sides didn't settle, then an administrative law judge would decide the amount, if any, that Geo would have to pay. It's unclear how the negotiations played out, Jonesi said, but in its motion to dismiss, Geo suggested it would take the case in front of a jury, questioned some of EPA's findings and questioned if the agency had overstepped its authority. There were 'litigation risks', which is common in enforcement cases, Jonesi said. Under normal circumstances, if EPA enforcement officials felt they might lose in court, then they would probably offer a settlement with a much lower fine. 'Instead they just walked away and said 'We're not going to bother' – that's very unusual,' Jonesi said. Geo and its affiliated Pacs donated heavily to Trump Pacs and Republican congressional campaigns, federal election records compiled by the Open Secrets nonprofit shows. That included a $1m to Trump's Make America Great Again Pac, and over $1.2m to the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund. Geo also contributed $500,000 to Trump's inauguration. Geo was the first company to max out political donations to Trump's campaign. In his first day in office, Trump reversed a Biden executive order that aimed to curb the federal government's use of private prisons. Ice is holding about 50,000 people in immigration detention, an approximately 50% increase since January, though not all are held at Geo facilities. The EPA case is one of many that raises questions about favors in exchange for campaign donations, but it is 'a more egregious case than most', said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the Public Citizen nonprofit, which advocates for government transparency. 'Trump rewards his friends, and friends are those who give him money, and friends are those who comply with his edicts, and one of his main edicts is on immigration,' Holman said. With Republicans fully in control of the government, there's little that can be done in response, Holman added, unless Democrats retake at least part of Congress in 2026. 'The midterm elections means everything,' Holman said.
