Somali charged with plot to blow up US mall

A Somali living in Ohio has been charged with plotting with other al-Qaida operatives to blow up a US shopping mall.

The four count indictment, returned by a grand jury in the state capital, Columbus, charges that Nuradin Abdi, aged 32, conspired with admitted al-Qaida member Iyman Faris and others to detonate a bomb at the unidentified shopping mall after he obtained military-style training in Ethiopia.

Abdi is also charged with fraud and misuse of documents by claiming that he had been granted valid asylum status in the United States.

Prosecutors say he obtained that refugee document under false pretences.

A US government motion seeking to keep Abdi in detention says he returned to the United States from Africa in March 2000 and was met at the airport in Columbus by Faris.

Those two and other unidentified co-conspirators were involved in the alleged shopping mall plot, prosecutors say.

One of the immigration charges contends that Abdi concealed his true destination when he applied in April 1999, for a US travel document.

He said he was going to Germany and Saudi Arabia to visit Mecca and relatives.

In fact, “as the defendant well knew, he planned to travel to Ogaden, Ethiopia, for the purpose of obtaining military-style training in preparation for violent Jihad”, the indictment says.

The training allegedly included use of guns, bombs and guerrilla warfare.

Faris is serving a 20-year federal sentence after pleading guilty last June to providing material support to al-Qaida.

Faris, an Ohio-based truck driver originally from Kashmir, admitted plotting to sever the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and to derail trains in New York or Washington.

Neither of those plots came to fruition.

Faris had received instructions from top al-Qaida leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for what might have been a second wave of attacks to follow those of September 11, 2001, investigators say.

Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the hijackings, is in US custody at an undisclosed overseas location.