On January 15, Mohmoud Elhassan headed out in his taxi from Northern Virginia to pick up a friend who was preparing to travel overseas. They pulled over at a rest stop where the friend, Joseph Farrokh, shaved off his beard. Then, still hours early for Farrokh’s flight, they pulled into a mall to kill time.
Finally, Elhassan called another cab to ferry Farrokh to the Richmond airport. Elhassan began driving back north.
The shave and the second taxi were intended to help the pair avoid detection as Farrokh set out to head to Syria to join the Islamic State. It was no use; the FBI had been watching the whole time and an undercover informant was in on the plan. Farrokh was arrested as he walked toward his gate, Elhassan in the food court of Potomac Mills mall.
Elhassan, 26, pleaded guilty in court Monday morning to attempting to help a terrorist group and giving false statements to the FBI. He admitted that he introduced Farrokh to the undercover informant at Farrokh’s wedding last fall and spoke numerous times about ways to get to Syria. He also lied to investigators, claiming his friend had flown out of Dulles International Airport to attend a funeral in California.
But he may yet go to trial on a charge of conspiracy, as he argues that he never himself tried to go abroad.
“There’s an issue of whether this is more than an attempt” to help the terrorist group, Elhassan’s attorney Thomas Durkin said after court.
A trial would be “meaningless,” Durkin argued, because it is unlikely to have any effect on Elhassan’s sentence. He hopes prosecutors will agree to drop the conspiracy charge.
He also said there are personal details that put Elhassan’s actions in context.
“Preceeding all this, he was under tremendous emotional and family problems,” Durkin said. “His mother had died at a young age, which was traumatic for him and his family.”
Elhassan’s father had died in 2008, which is when most of his family came from Sudan to the United States. His mother became sick in 2014 and died of cancer in September of 2015.
Durkin called Elhassan “a very very thoughtful and intelligent kid,” who, as a refugee in Cairo, studied at Al-Azhar University, the oldest in Egypt. In the United States, before his arrest, he was a student at Northern Virginia Community College.
Elhassan had initially pleaded not guilty, with defense attorney Ashraf Nubani arguing the case was manufactured by undercover informants. Nubani identified the key informant as Jesse Morton, a propagandist for Muslim violence who was let out of prison over seven years early.
Farrokh, 29, pleaded guilty earlier this year and was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison. Raised by a Shiite Muslim father and a Christian mother, he turned to Islam in his 20s after battling an opioid addiction. Court documents show he latched onto an extreme religiosity and became fixated on the idea of dying as a martyr on the battlefield in Syria. After his arrest, he expressed bafflement and disgust at his own actions.
Featured Image: Associated Press
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Rachel Weiner
