WASHINGTON — A 20-year-old student from Saudi Arabia who studied chemical engineering at Texas Tech University is facing a federal charge of attempted use of a bomb against potential targets that included the Dallas home of former President George W. Bush.
Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, currently enrolled at South Plains College near Lubbock, Texas, was arrested Wednesday by the FBI after an extensive investigation that included court approved electronic surveillance of his telephone calls and email traffic, and two court approved searches of his one-bedroom apartment since Feb. 14, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
Aldawsari, who is in the U.S. legally, is to appear before a federal judge in Lubbock this morning.
Aldawsari had conducted online research on how to build a bomb and was “acquiring most of the ingredients and equipment necessary” to do it, the Justice Department said in a statement. He also had used the Internet to research “several potential U.S. targets,” the government alleged.
The FBI said its investigation tracked Aldawsari’s online research and three purchases of explosives-related chemicals over a period of months, as well as research into the step-by-step conversion of a cellular telephone into a detonator. Aldawsari also obtained information from a website in January that offered “a simplified lesson on how to booby-trap a vehicle with items that are readily available in every home,” the FBI said.
Law enforcement agents said Aldawsari sent e-mails to himself with titles such as “nice targets,” including reservoir dams in Colorado and California, unspecified hydroelectric dams and nuclear-power plants, andthe home addresses of three Americans stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during their military service.
Aldawsari sent himself an e-mail Feb. 6 titled “tyrant’s house” that “listed the Dallas address for former President George W. Bush,” according to a 13-page affidavit that Lubbock-based FBI agent Michael Orndorff filed to obtain the arrest warrant.
Aldawsari also reportedly described a plan in his journal that involved leaving car bombs in different places during rush hour in New York City and remotely detonating them.
Aldawsari’s journal “indicates that he has been planning to commit a terrorist attack in the United States for years,” Orndorff wrote in the affidavit.
Aldawsari, Orndorff said, believed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks brought about a “big change” in his thinking, and he was “inspired by the speeches of Osama bin Laden.”
Special Agent Mark White, a spokesman for the Dallas FBI, whose jurisdiction includes Lubbock, said the terrorism investigation is ongoing, but “the federal complaint contains no allegations that he received direction from or was under the control of a foreign terrorist organization.”
“We are confident that we have eliminated the alleged threat by Aldawsari,” White said.
“But,” he emphasized, “this was not just some kid who thought he would get some chemicals. This guy was training, and he knew what was needed to create a bomb. He had the capability to do it and had already bought sulfuric and nitric acids. This guy was moving along.”
Agents say he also purportedly purchased items including a gas mask, a hazardous material suit, a soldering-iron kit, glass beakers and flasks, wiring, a stun gun, clocks and a battery tester.
The affidavit also alleges that Aldawsari conducted research that could indicate that he considered using baby dolls to conceal explosives, and was considering targeting a nightclub with an explosive concealed in a backpack.
Spokesman Ed Donovan at Secret Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., declined to comment about the potential threat to the former president.
David Sherzer, spokesman for Bush in Dallas, said: “No comment from here.”
President Barack Obama was alerted to the impending arrest beforehand, according to White House press secretary Jay Carney. “The arrest once again underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad,” he said.
Obama had not spoken to Bush about the arrest, Carney said.
If convicted, Aldawsari faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Aldawsari arrived in the United States in 2008 with a six-year student visa and a scholarship from an unnamed Saudi-based industrial corporation. He studied English as a second language for 10 months before studying chemical engineering at Texas Tech University for 18 months. He transferred to South Plains College in January to study business, the affidavit said.
“I excelled in my studies in high school in order to take advantage of an opportunity for a scholarship in America, offered by the [Saudi royalfamily] and its companies,” Aldawsari purportedly wrote in a journal entry in Arabic translated by the FBI and cited in the affidavit. “And now, mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for jihad.”
Last March, Aldawsari purportedly “expressed his dissatisfaction with the current condition of Muslims, lamenting what he views as their passivity and pacifism,” the FBI affidavit recounted. Addressing God in the entry, Aldawsari purportedly wrote: “Grant me martyrdom for your sake and make jihad easy for me.”
On Feb. 8, Orndorff went undercover to pose as an employee of the North Carolina firm where Aldawsari had ordered explosives-related chemicals in late January - purportedly one of the last chemical ingredients needed to make a bomb.
The FBI agent said he asked Aldawsari about the nature of the “off campus, personal research” into phenol that he had described earlier to an official at the firm. Phenol is a chemical that can be used to make the explosive trinitrophenol.
Aldawsari claimed to still be a student at Texas Tech University and that he was conducting research into cleaners that contained phenol “for the purpose of reducing their odor so that he could get into a bigger university,” the FBI agent wrote.
U.S. Attorney James Jacks, based in Dallas, said the initial break came from private individuals and companies alarmed by Aldawsari’s purported purchase of explosives related chemicals. Carolina Biological Supply in Burlington, N.C., for example, “reported a suspicious attempted purchase” of more than a gallon of phenol. Con-way Freight in Lubbock contacted the Lubbock Police Department after the order arrived for pickup.
In a separate case Thursday, a federal judge sentenced a 21-year-old Virginia man to 25 years in prison for trying to join an al-Qaida-linked terrorist group in Somalia and making threats against the creators of TV’s South Park over their depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.
Zachary Adam Chesser of Oakton pleaded guilty in October to charges of providing material support to terrorists, communicating threats and soliciting crimes of violence in his case, which is being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
He was arrested in July, days after he and his wife drove with their infant son to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was stopped there after he tried to board a flight to Uganda before heading to Somalia, where he planned to join al-Shabab, an Islamic terrorist group trying to oust Somalia’s government.
Chesser also admitted making threats from April to July over the Internet to South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, saying they would “wind up like Theo Van Gogh.” The reference was to a Dutch filmmaker gunned down in 2004 after he attacked the treatment of women in Islamic society.
Information for this article was contributed by Stewart M. Powell of the Houston Chronicle; by Jason Trahan of The Dallas Morning News; by Adam Goldman, Betsy Blaney, Linda Stewart Ball and P. Solomon Banda of The Associated Press; by Richard A. Serrano of the Tribune Washington Bureau; and by Dana Hedgpeth of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/25/2011