The FBI on Thursday added a former taxi driver from northern Virginia to its list of most-wanted terrorists, saying he was a recruiter for the al-Shabab terror group in Somalia.
An arrest warrant, originally issued in February, was unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria for Liban Haji Mohamed, 29, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Somalia.
He is the older brother of Gulet Mohamed, who for the past four years has been challenging his placement on the government’s no-fly list, the attorney representing the younger Mohamed, Gadeir Abbas, told The Associated Press on Thursday. A hearing on Gulet Mohamed’s case is scheduled in federal court in Alexandria on Friday.
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Abbas said that in 2012, the Mohamed family lost contact with Liban Mohamed and asked the lawyer to see if the FBI knew of his whereabouts.
The U.S. has long refused to even confirm whether Gulet Mohamed is on the no-fly list. Gulet Mohamed said he went to Somalia and Yemen briefly in 2009 to stay with family and learn Arabic, and investigators questioned him about his travels.
The FBI, in announcing Liban Mohamed’s placement on the most-wanted list, described him as a “close associate” of Zachary Chesser, a northern Virginia man who in 2011 was sentenced to 25 years in prison for trying to join al-Shabab and for making online threats against the creators of the “South Park” cartoon for an episode perceived as an insult to the prophet Muhammad.
