TOLEDO – A judge has imposed a 27-year prison term for a one-time engineering student at OSU accused of supporting terrorism and trying to arrange the killing of the Ohio federal judge who originally oversaw his case.
Monday’s sentence from Judge Edmund Sargus for defendant Yahya Farooq Mohammad also requires the Indian citizen to be deported at the end of his sentence and to pay a $25,000 fine.
Mohammad is one of four men with Ohio ties who were accused in 2015 of working to send money to Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al Qaida leader killed by a U.S. drone in 2011.
Mohammad’s attorney has said another inmate trying to reduce his own sentence drew Mohammad into the plot to kill federal Judge Jack Zouhary.
Federal authorities say Mohammad, an Indian citizen who was an engineering student at Ohio State between 2002 and 2004, married a U.S. citizen in 2008 and was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2015 along with his brother, Ibrahim Mohammad; Asif Ahmed Salim and Sultane Room Salim.
The remaining three defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Mohammad admitted to traveling with two associates to Yemen in 2009 to meet Awlaki and deliver $22,000 that they had raised “in an effort to support violent jihad against U.S. military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world,” according to federal authorities.
Although the failed to meet Awlaki in person, Mohammad and his associates sent Awlaki the funds by courier, authorities said.
In addition to pleading guilty to conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorists, Mohammad also admitted to soliciting an undercover FBI employee, posing as a “hitman,” to kidnap and murder U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, who assigned to the terrorism case.
Authorities say Mohammad told another inmate in the Lucas County Corrections Center that he wanted Zouhary kidnapped and murdered and that he was willing to pay $15,000 to have it done.