Four men were indicted Thursday by the Department of Justice for conspiring to give money to Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda operative, to support terrorist attacks.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the men were charged in Ohio with giving material support to terrorists and conspiring to obstruct justice. The four suspects are two pairs of brothers, Farooq and Ibrahim Mohammad and Asif and Sultane Salim. The Mohammad brothers are also facing bank fraud conspiracy charges.
The indictment explains that the four individuals accumulated about $22,000 by running up big credit card balances and other means in 2009 and tried to deliver the money to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who acted as the spokesperson for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011.
One of the Mohammad brothers and other conspirators traveled to Yemen to provide Awlaki with the money in June 2009 "but were unable to personally meet with him because of the presence of Yemeni government soldiers in the village," according to the indictment.
They eventually handed off the money to one of the terrorist’s associates. Months later, one of Awlaki’s followers tried unsuccessfully to detonate a bomb hidden on his person on a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said that the charges "outline a plan to send thousands of dollars to a known terrorist [Awlaki], a plan which came to fruition shortly before one of the most notorious attempted attacks in recent memory--an attack claimed by that same terrorist."