A 23-year-old Georgia man was convicted on terror-related charges after five-hours of deliberating, prosecutors said.
Ehsanul Islam Sadequee of an Atlanta suburb was found guilty after a seven-day trial on four counts of supporting terrorism and a foreign terrorists organization, CNN reports.
Just weeks ago, a federal judge convicted Sadequee’s accomplice, Syed Haris Ahmed, of providing material support to the U.S. terror attacks and abroad. Ahmed was a Georgia Tech student.
Sentencing for both suspects is scheduled for October 15. Both face up to 60 years in prison.
“With this guilty verdict, a long and successful international counterterrorism investigation comes to a close,” said David Nahmias, U.S attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in the news release.
“Defendants in the United States, the United Kingdom, Bosnia and elsewhere — all of whom conspired together to provide material support to violent jihad — are now safely behind bars. For that, we can be thankful.”
Sadequee , a Virginia native, is of Bangladeshi decent and took residence in the country in 2001, prosecutors said. The said Sadequee sent emails expressing his desires to join the Taliban and ban together to to fight against the U.S.
By 2005, Sadequee returned to his family’s Roswell, Georgia home and eventually “entered an illegal agreement — a conspiracy — with others to provide material support to terrorists engaged in violent jihad,” prosecutors said in the news release.
Ahmed and Sadequee were charged in the same indictment. Authorities alleged the two traveled to Canada in March 2005 to meet with three other co-conspirators they met online.
“While in Canada, Sadequee and his co-conspirators discussed their plans to travel to Pakistan in an effort to attend a paramilitary training camp operated by a terrorist organization, such as Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LET), as preparation for engaging in violent jihad abroad or in the United States,” the prosecutors’ statement said.
“They also discussed potential targets for terrorist attacks in the United States.”
In addition, authorities contended Ahmed and Sadequee made “casing videos” of landmarks in the Washington area, such as the U.S. Capitol, the World Bank Building and a Masonic temple.
The videos were found on the hard drives of at least two men who were convicted on terrorism charges in the United Kingdom. According to prosecutors, those two men were found to possess a large quantity of “violent jihad materials.”
Ahmed traveled to Pakistan in July 2005 in an attempt to enter a training camp, but his family and others convinced him to postpone that effort, according to Nahmias’ statement.
The day before Ahmed returned to Atlanta, however, Sadequee departed for Bangladesh, carrying items hidden in the liner of his suitcase, including an encrypted CD and a map of Washington that included all of the targets he and Ahmed had cased, authorities said.
While in Bangladesh, Sadequee conspired with members of a “violent jihadist organization known as al Qaeda in northern Europe,” prosecutors said. One of the men later was convicted of terrorism offenses in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is in prison there.
Meanwhile, the FBI was investigating Ahmed, who then was at Georgia Tech, in connection with the international terrorism investigation. Ahmed “made increasingly incriminating statements” during questioning, prosecutors said, and “efforts by the FBI to obtain Ahmed’s cooperation in the ongoing international terrorism investigation ended after the FBI discovered that Ahmed was surreptitiously contacting Sadequee, who was still in Bangladesh, to advise him of the FBI investigation and warn him not to return to the United States.”
