A Queens, New York man pleaded guilty yesterday to attempting to provide material support to ISIS.
Parveg Ahmed, 22, faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in prison.
New York Man Pleads Guilty to Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIS https://t.co/FVT7rXFkRD
— Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept) June 20, 2018
Ahmed, who is a U.S. citizen, travelled to Saudi Arabia in June 2017 to celebrate an Islamic religious holiday.
Once he arrived in Saudi Arabia, he tried to get to Syria to join ISIS, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Ahmed was arrested in a country that borders Syria and was deported back to the United States on Aug. 28, 2017.
Upon landing in the U.S., Ahmed was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Even before his trip to Saudi Arabia, Ahmed showed strong support on social media for ISIS and supporters of ISIS.
In July 2017, Ahmed’s personal computer was seized by JTTF agents, and it was found that he had listened to recordings of radical Islamic clerics Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdullah el-Faisal.
Agents also discovered that on the same day Ahmed left the United States for the Middle East, he researched how to erase the data on his computer.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Craig Heeren and Margaret Lee of the Eastern District of New York are in charge of the prosecution, with assistance from Trial Attorney Joshua Champagne of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.
Ahmed’s guilty plea was accepted by U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly.
