(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A teenage Egyptian national named Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan was arrested earlier this month for sending bomb-making instructions to an FBI informant, and allegedly telling the informant to attack the Israeli Consulate General of Israel in New York City.
According to charging papers, Hassan appears to be a teenager who’s currently in removal proceedings with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The charging papers, which were unsealed Monday and first reported by CourtWatch, say that the FBI interviewed him in 2022, when he was a juvenile, due to his pro-ISIS social media posts.
Some two years later, the FBI received a tip in May from Fairfax County Police that an anonymous Twitter/X user was engaging in “radical and terrorist-leaning behavior.” That user turned out to be Hassan.
In August, an FBI informant commented on one of Hassan’s tweets about Ahmad Musa Jibril—an Islamic cleric and convicted felon—saying that he wanted to attend one of Jibril’s lectures. The two began a dialogue after that.
In your latest FBI entrapment news, an Egyptian teenager was arrested for sending bomb-making instructions to an informant. The FBI claims the Egyptian "recruited" the informant to attack an Israeli consulate.
Does this sound like recruitment to you? "Maybe [Allah] wants me to… https://t.co/c47Hf5vexl pic.twitter.com/u5t8y9GBSP
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) December 17, 2024
Eventually, the two moved their conversation to an encrypted chat application called SimpleX. There, Hassan sent the FBI informant a pro-ISIS video on Nov. 16 that called for the killing of Jews. The FBI informant responded to the video by pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and calling Hassan his emir, which is Arabic for ruler. The FBI informant also said he was “waiting on Hassan’s direction,” to which Hassan responded with a heart emoji, according to the FBI’s complaint.
Six days later, the FBI informant messaged Hassan again, saying that if he could not travel to join ISIS, then “maybe [Allah] wants me to act here.” Hassan allegedly responded that the informant should “aim for government buildings, use a Zastava rifle if you can access one to carry out your attack, and All Praises to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds…Or buy a 3d printed gun and just buy ammunition.”
On Nov. 23, the FBI informant asked Hassan to select the target, the date of the attack, and asked if he had any bomb-making manuals.
“HASSAN told CHS-1 that he could find a bomb-making instructions by looking for a specific search term on archive.org and provided CHS-1 advice for bypassing Google’s potential censorship of the search results,” the criminal complaint said.
“Eventually, however, HASSAN sent CHS-1 a direct link to the video with the bomb-making instructions. HASSAN suggested that, based on the size of the bomb, CHS-1 should get a backpack to put the bomb in.”
The next day, he sent the informant the land address for the Consulate General of Israel.
The two continued to talk over the next few days, with Hassan giving the informant more instructions, including to record the livestream footage of the operation to distribute it to the ISIS media department.
One of the final interactions was Dec. 3, when Hassan allegedly directed the FBI informant on “how to conduct an attack on the General Consulate of Israel in New York, NY and how to escape to a country with no extradition laws with the United States,” the charging papers said.
A court hearing for Hassan has not yet been publicly announced. He faces decades in prison if convicted.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
