ISIS-K, the Afghanistan branch of ISIS, had directed an Afghan man’s foiled plot to attack U.S. Election Day, according to two senior U.S. officials briefed on the matter.
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, was arrested by the FBI last week in Oklahoma and is accused of planning to purchase two AK-47 rifles, 10 magazines and ammunition and carry out a mass shooting attack on Election Day targeting large groups of people, according to court documents and Tawhedi’s alleged statements to the FBI after his arrest.
ISIS-K was responsible for the deadly Crocus City Hall concert attack near Moscow and other plots. The revelation that a foreign terror organization was in communication with a would-be attacker inside the U.S. makes the alleged Election Day plot different from most terrorism cases in the past decade, most of which involved people self-radicalized online or self-directed attempts.
The charging documents say Tawhedi told the FBI that he was communicating with a person named “Malik” and that he knew “Malik” was affiliated with ISIS. Tawhedi has not yet had his arraignment, and no plea has been entered in his case.
When asked about ISIS-K’s direct involvement in the case, a FBI spokesperson declined to comment.
Tawhedi had worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan. He arrived in the U.S. in September 2021 on a special immigrant visa a month after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, court documents said.
Tawhedi had passed two rounds of vetting — as every Afghan resettled in the U.S. undergoes a rigorous screening and vetting process regardless of which agency they previously worked with — and no derogatory information was detected, a senior administration official familiar with the details previously told NBC News.
NBC News was first to report that a family member of Tawhedi was arrested and charged by French law enforcement this weekend with planning to conduct an attack on a soccer stadium or a shopping center in that country, according to the Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office in Paris.
In that case, the Afghan charged was 22 years old.
In the France case, law enforcement officials told NBC News they had opened a preliminary investigation into a potential terror plot in France on Sept. 27. Then on Oct. 8, one day after Tawhedi’s arrest in Oklahoma, the 22-year-old and two other unnamed individuals were arrested in Toulouse and Fronton, in the Haute-Garonne region of southwestern France where they lived.
The two other individuals were questioned and released.
A French law enforcement official said the investigations revealed “the existence of a planned violent action targeting people in a football stadium or a shopping center instigated by one of them, age 22, of Afghan nationality.” Investigators also found evidence that “establish[es] radicalization and adherence to the ideology of the Islamic State.”
The emergence of ISIS-K as a deadly terrorist organization plotting and directing attacks worldwide has been a growing problem, multiple U.S. officials have previously told NBC News.
In March, the group directed an attack that killed 130 people and injured hundreds more at Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, Russia.
It also launched an attack in Iran this year that killed dozens and other high-profile attacks have been disrupted in Europe.
Marlene Lenthang contributed.
Leave a Reply