The United States claimed on Friday, September 6, to have foiled a “terrorist attack” against Jews in New York, which was allegedly carried out around October 7 in the name of the Islamic State group (IS) by a Pakistani living in Canada.
The 20-year-old young man, “Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, aka Shazeb Jadoon, attempted to enter the United States to commit a mass shooting at a Jewish center in New York” And “was arrested on September 4 in Canada following a request from the federal prosecutor’s office” Manhattan, the US Justice Department said in a statement.
“The accused is suspected of planning a terrorist attack around October 7 this year with the stated aim of massacring, in the name of ISIS, as many Jews as possible.”denounced the Minister of Justice, Merrick Garland.
For the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Christopher Wray, the young Pakistani was “determined to kill Jews here in the United States, nearly a year after Hamas’s heinous attack on Israel”October 7, 2023.
Under surveillance since November
According to the investigation by the FBI and the federal prosecutor’s office in New York, cited in the press release, Mr. Khan, a resident of Canada, attempted to travel to New York where “He intended to carry out a mass shooting in support of ISIS at a Jewish center in Brooklyn using automatic and semi-automatic weapons.”one of the five boroughs of the multicultural megacity of the United States, a country with the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, some six million.
The young man had been under surveillance since last November, particularly for his messages on social networks, his encrypted communications and the “distribution of IS propaganda videos and literature”according to the Justice Ministry.
Minister Garland said: “deeply grateful to [ses] Canadian partners for acting quickly and detaining the accused”.