(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The FBI arrested an 18-year-old Saturday on terrorism charges after targeting him for years in an investigation that involved at least three undercover informants and an undercover agent.
The Justice Department announced the arrest Monday, revealing that the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated Idaho teenager Alexander Scott Mercurio for attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS.
“His plan involved using flame-covered weapons, explosives, knives, a machete, a pipe, and ultimately firearms,” the DOJ said in its criminal complaint.
According to Mercurio’s charging papers, the FBI discovered the teenager when it was investigating a terrorism-financing network in 2021. The FBI discovered that Mercurio—who would have been 15 or 16 at the time—was talking to two individuals who were providing funds for ISIS and its Afghanistan-based affiliate, ISIS-K.
One of the individuals who was talking to Mercurio—referred to in charging papers as “individual-2”—likely died around July 2022, according to the DOJ. After that happened, an FBI informant assumed individual-2’s identity.
Mercurio would communicate with the FBI informant for over the next year, allegedly expressing his desire to commit acts of terrorism. Mercurio also revealed in October 2022 that his parents sent him to therapy—suggesting a possible mental illness at play with this case.
In late 2023 and early this year, however, Mercurio was apparently wavering. In one message, he told the FBI informant that he doesn’t “want to fight and die for the sale of Allah.”
“I just want to die and have all my problems go away,” he said.
But on March 21, he messaged the informant again with a plan to “attack with a homemade flamethrower. Primarily against Churches.”
Mercurio also messaged a second FBI informant about committing jihad.
According to the charging papers, that informant first targeted the teenager in person on Feb. 16, entering his father’s office and asking to take him out to lunch. The informant would give Mercurio an ISIS flag and take a picture of him posed in front of it.
Additionally, Mercurio messaged a third FBI informant on April 2 and 3, telling the informant that he planned on carrying out an attack the following Sunday, April 7. The FBI arrested him the day before, finding a metal pipe, handcuffs, a folding saw, two cannisters of butane fuel, an ISIS flag—which was provided to him by the second FBI informant—and other equipment in his room.
If convicted, Mercurio faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.
Entrapping Autistic Teens
Mercurio’s arrest marked at least the fifth teenager arrested by the FBI over the last year in highly dubious terrorism stings.
Last July, then-18-year-old Davin Meyer was arrested as he was about to board an international flight—also out of Denver—allegedly to travel to the Middle East and fight for ISIS. Meyer’s mother, who originally approached law enforcement out of concern for her son, said that the FBI entrapped the boy.
Before Meyer was arrested in July, the FBI announced in June that it arrested 18-year-old Mateo Ventura for intending to support ISIS. However, Ventura’s father, has also accused the FBI of entrapping his son.
Along with Meyer and Ventura, the FBI arrested a 17-year-old boy last August for supposedly plotting to carry out an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on American soil.
Most recently, the FBI arrested arrested a teenager in December who was supposedly on his way from Denver to fight for ISIS in the Middle East. But like the others, the details of that case show that the teenager, 18-year-old Humzah Mashkoor, was targeted online since he was 16 by at least four undercover FBI agents. And moreover, Mashkoor suffers from mental illness and has high-functioning autism, according to his family.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
