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Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 21, of North Bergen, and Carlos Eduardo “Omar” Almonte, 24, of Elmwood Park, told a federal judge in Newark that they practiced combat tactics, bought military gear at various stores, and lifted weights for the purpose of slaughtering American troops and others.
The pair admitted they also watched an assortment of videos of radicals toting AK-47s and terrorist leaders preaching jihad. They even trained on Garrett Mountain in Woodland Park.
“They keep saying that Americans are their enemies, that everybody other than Islamic followers are their enemies… and they all must be killed,” a tipster who knows the pair wrote to the FBI.
Almonte, left, and Alessa
Each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to murder persons outside the United States on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization.
Their parents actually turned in both men, who were snatched up last June by federal agents as they were boarding separate flights at JFK International Airport in Queens. A U.S. District Court judge ordered them held without bail since then.
At one point while FBI agents were interviewing Almonte outside his house, his parents told investigators Alessa was hiding inside the house, holding a large knife and vowing to “kill the agents if they entered the residence,” a federal agent said.
“Through covert recordings and their admissions today, Alessa’s and Almonte’s own words confirm they took steps down a deadly path,” U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said.
Alessa and Almonte “planned and trained for a mission that began in their New Jersey neighborhoods and would end with the murder of innocent civilians,” he said.
Both admitted that they planned to join Al Shabaab and target members of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia and African Union soldiers. Al Shabaab has conducted military assaults, bombings, and other violent acts, and has successfully recruited foreigners – including Americans and other Westerners – to join its ranks, Fishman said.
In October 2006, the FBI learned about both men. An undercover officer from the NYPD recorded conversations and meetings at which the defendants’ reviewed their plans, court documents show.
They’d waited three years for the opportunity, Almonte was recorded telling an undercover agent about him and his companion, Alessa, a Union Hill High School graduate who lived in North Bergen.
In another, Alessa said: “I got a knife this big in my house, and whoever gets next to me, I’m a cut them in half with it, even if I die.”
“A lot of people need to get killed, bro, swear to God,” Alessa was recorded saying. “I have to get a … assault rifle and just kill anyone that even looks at me the wrong way.
“[M]y soul cannot rest until I shed blood. I wanna, like, be the world’s known terrorist.
“I‘m gonna get locked up in the airport? Then you‘re gonna die here, then. That‘s how it is. Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy guy. He‘s not better than me. I‘ll do twice what he did.”
(He was referring to Major Nidal Hassan, charged with shooting and killing several people in Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009.)
During a weight-lifting session at a North Bergen gym, Alessa told the agent that “stronger muscles mean bigger muscles, which means killing more non-Muslims,” according to the complaint.
Almonte and the agent used a first-person-shooter computer simulator at a Jersey City store, it says, adding that Almonte asked for a simulator for Somalia but was told the store didn’t have it. Alessa joined in a week later at a store in North Bergen, where they used fake names, the FBI said.
The pair also gave the agent thousands of dollars to deposit in accounts that both could access in Egypt, while Alessa got his parents to buy him a ticket to Cairo out of JFK instead of Newark Liberty International Airport to avoid a connecting flight — and the possibility of being caught, the FBI said.
Alessa and Almonte admitted today that they acquired, viewed, and showed others videos and written materials for Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, and other extremist groups, which, Fishman said, “advocated, depicted, and/or sought to justify the killing of individuals who opposed them, including civilians.
They also admitted they went to Jordan in February 2007 to meet with radical Islamist groups.
U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise scheduled sentencing for June 20 in
Newark federal court.
Fishman credited the FBI; the Newark Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF); the
New York City Police Department; and the State of New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
The JTTF includes Agents and officers of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection; the U.S. Department of State; the New Jersey State Police; the Jersey City and Bayonne police departments; and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department.
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