Ohio man Laith Waleed Alebbini was arrested on Wednesday night by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force for attempting to leave the U.S. to support terrorist operations with the Islamic State. Alebbini, 26, was arrested at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport as he entered TSA security check lines, according to Fox News. His arrest adds to the increased number of legal U.S. citizens that have been arrested recently fleeing to aid the terrorist organization, with two men being arrested in Florida on similar charges earlier this year.
This was not Alebbini’s first run in with law enforcement agents. He was arrested in January of 2017 for attempting to break into the Turkish Embassy in Washington, where the FBI subsequently began to investigate him after he remarked: “If I had a bomb on me, I swear to God, three embassies would have gone down.”
He appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Newman on Thursday in Dayton, Ohio.
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