Reuters reports that a New Jersey man arrested in Kenya has been charged for trying to aid militant group al-Shabaab, the US Justice Department said, alleging he was motivated by Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on Israel to wage violence.
The arrest comes amid heightened incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the wake of the Israel-Gaza conflict, which have raised terror threat levels in the United States.
Karrem Nasr, a US citizen who moved from New Jersey to Egypt around July, was taken into custody in Nairobi on Dec 14 and brought to the United States on Thursday, the Justice Department said in a statement on Friday.
The 23-year-old has been charged with “attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to prosecutors. The US designates al Shabaab as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
In communications exchanged with an FBI confidential source and postings online, Nasr stated that he had been thinking about “engaging in jihad for a long time, and he was particularly motivated to become a jihadi by the Oct 7 Hamas attack in Israel,” prosecutors added.
