A former college student who expressed extremist Islamist ideas to her roommates was arrested in Minnesota for setting a series of fires at her alma mater in retaliation for American military “crimes” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Star Tribune reported.
Nineteen-year-old Tnuza Jamal Hassan was arrested after an almost two and a half hour spree at St. Catherine University in St. Paul in which she reportedly set eight fires across campus.
“You guys are lucky that I don’t know how to build a bomb because I would have
done that,” she told police and fire investigators upon her capture.
No one was hurt in the fires, however one of the fires was set in a building that housed a daycare center. Thirty-three children, eight adults and 10-15 students were evacuated from that building.
Court documents state: “Hassan said she started the fires because she’s been reading about the U.S. military destroying schools in Iraq and Afghanistan and she felt that she should do exactly the same thing.
“She said that her fire-starting was not as successful as she had wanted. She said the most successful fire she set was at Saint Mary’s [residence hall] where she set a couch on fire.”
While attending the college Hassan reportedly wrote a letter to her roommates espousing “radical ideas about supporting Muslims and bringing back the caliphate.” Frightened by the letter, her roommates turned it over to campus security.
Hassan appeared at her bail hearing with an improvised burqa consisting of a black covering over her face, exposing only her eyes, and a large white sheet draped over her head and the orange jail jumpsuit she was required to wear.
Child pornography was found on the electronic devices of a Virginia man who was arrested at the end of last year for destroying evidence that linked him to ISIS.
Sean Andrew Duncan, a convert to Islam, was also suspected of planning a terror attack and providing information to an ISIS contact about building homemade bombs.
In the ongoing case, federal agents who searched the devices also found hundreds of sexually-explicit images of pre-pubescent children, including infants, according to court documents.
Duncan and his wife tried to travel to Turkey in 2016 but were denied entry and returned to the U.S. At that point, he was interviewed by the FBI. Two days later, he deleted his Facebook account and changed his phone number.
Duncan was named as a U.S. contact by an ISIS supporter in custody overseas. The FBI also said Duncan gave advice on vetting questions to an undercover FBI agent posing as an ISIS recruit.
A Twitter account with an Arabic name (which translated roughly to “The Islamic State”) was linked to Duncan’s phone.
When agents showed up at his house in Sterling with a search warrant, he ran out the back door, throwing out a bag with broken pieces of a thumb drive soaked in an unidentified liquid.
A relative reported that after Duncan converted to Islam he suspected Duncan had become radicalized as he had voiced support of Westerners being beheaded in the Middle East.
An Islamist terrorist facing extradition to the U.S. for conspiring to kill Americans and supporting terrorists (along with other crimes) attacked guards with scissors in a French prison where he is being held.
Christian Ganczarski, 51, a German convert to Islam who had personal contact with Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan, is currently in his fifteenth year of an 18-year sentence for an al-Qaeda attack on a synagogue in Tunisia that left 21 people dead.
A few days before he attacked the guards, Ganczarski was told the U.S. wanted him extradited at the end of his current jail term for his involvement with the 9/11 attacks. Ganczarski faces four counts in the U.S., including providing “critical support to the most prolific terrorists of our time.” If convicted of the charges, he could face life in prison in the U.S.
The indictment against Ganczarski was unsealed by the court of the Southern District of New York last week.
“The unsealing of the indictment exemplifies this office’s commitment to the relentless pursuit and prosecution of those who seek to harm Americans,” said Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
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