Teenager held in US over Christmas festival bomb plot

WASHINGTON - A teenager was arrested on suspicion of trying to detonate a car bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in the northwestern US state of Oregon, news reports said Saturday.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somalia-born naturalized US citizen, was arrested moments before the ceremony took place Friday night in Portland, the US Attorney’s Office in Oregon said.

US judicial officials said Mohamud, 19, drove a van to the square where the lighting took place, believing he was going to detonate a bomb, but the explosives were dummies provided by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents.

Mohamud, a student at Oregon State University, was accused of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

“The threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” an FBI agent was quoted as saying by the news channel CNN.

The US Attorney’s Office said the public was never in danger.

The teenager was arrested after an undercover operation that began in 2009 when authorities learned that the young man was in contact with a suspected terrorist in Pakistan.

The two communicated regularly, authorities said, and “using coded language, they discussed the possibility of Mohamud travelling to Pakistan to prepare for violent jihad”.

An undercover agent then made contact with the Somali, posing as a friend of the person in Pakistan. This contact enabled officials to monitor Mohamud as the alleged bomb plot developed, the Justice Department said.

Mohamud allegedly told the undercover operative that he had written articles that were published in Jihad Recollections, an online magazine that advocated violent jihad, the news reports said.

At a meeting in August, the Justice Department said, Mohamud allegedly told undercover FBI agents he had been thinking of committing violent jihad since the age of 15, CNN reported.

According to an affidavit, Mohamud then told the operatives that he had identified a potential target for a bomb: the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland.