By Larbi Arbaoui
By Larbi Arbaoui
Morocco World News
Taroudant, Morocco, September 11, 2012
Amine El Khalifi, who pleaded guilty on June for planning a suicide attack on the Capitol, will be sentenced Friday in federal court in Alexandria.
His decision to plead guilty is not surprising: the man was caught with enough evidence and learned after his arrest that people with whom he was in contact, who went by the names Hussien and Yusuf, were undercover FBI agents and that he was the target of a sting operation.
According to a court paper cited by the Associated Press, FBI promised Amine El Khalifi “martyrdom payments” of up to $1,000 a month after he completed the attack.
According to the same court paper, El Khalifi received more than $5,700 from undercover FBI agents prior to his planned attack.
Since the expected attack would put an end to the life of El khalifi, he ordered that each of his parents would receive $ 500 for the rest of their lives for his expected “martyrdom operation”
As promised by the undercover FBI agents, the aforementioned sum was to be sent to his family living in Casablanca, Morocco on a monthly basis.
According to AP, The family was in dire need of financial support from their son after his father was forced to close down a bazaar in Casablanca that had been a primary source of income.
“Mr. El-Khalifi believed that one of his most important obligations was to care for his mother and father. Failing to do so would, again, meet with God’s disapproval. Without the promise of the ‘martyrdom payments’ to his parents, Mr. El-Khalifi would have had great difficulty completing the mission as he would have been shirking his responsibility to ensure their well-being,” federal public defender Kenneth Troccoli wrote in court papers as reported in Newsmax.
Amine El Khalifi, 29 and an illegal immigrant, was arrested blocks from the U.S. Capitol, on February 17 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for allegedly plotting to carry out a suicide bombing on the United States Capitol.
According to court records, El Khalifi entered the United States in 1999 on a visa, overstayed it and never applied for U.S. citizenship.
Elkhalifi Came to US at the age of 16, spent several years of working retail in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood and at other odd jobs and had occasional minor brushes with the law, including a marijuana charge and traffic violations.
In 2007, he was convicted of misdemeanor and received a five-day jail sentence. However, El Khalifi has never attracted more attention until 2010, when his suburban Virginia landlord called police after the man allegedly threatened to beat him up.
He is now charged with attempting to use a weapon of” mass destruction” against property owned and used by the United States, intending to detonate a bomb and to shoot people.
