Undercover FBI agents arrested an 18-year-old American man who tried to detonate what he believed was a car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, federal prosecutors said Saturday.

Adel Daoud, a US citizen from the Chicago suburb of Hillside, was arrested Friday night in an undercover operation in which an agent pretending to be a terrorist provided him with a phony car bomb and watched him press the trigger, prosecutors said.

The US Attorney's Office in Chicago, which announced the arrest Saturday, said the device was harmless and the public was never at risk.

Daoud is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to damage and destroy a building with an explosive. He remains in custody pending a detention and preliminary hearing set for Monday in federal court...

The FBI began monitoring Daoud after he started using an email account to get and distribute material about violent jihad and the killing of Americans, prosecutors said.

In May, two undercover FBI agents contacted Daoud in response to the material and exchanged electronic messages with him in which he expressed an interest in violent jihad in the United States or abroad, according to an affidavit by an FBI special agent.

Prosecutors say one of those agents introduced Daoud to a third undercover agent who claimed to be a terrorist living in New York.

Over the summer, the third agent and Daoud met six times in the suburb of Villa Park and exchanged messages, the affidavit said. Daoud then set about identifying 29 potential targets, including military recruiting centers, bars, malls and tourist attractions in Chicago, the document said.

He is accused of settling on a downtown bar and conducting surveillance on it using Google Street View and visiting the area in person to take photographs.

Describing the target to the agent, Daoud said it was also a concert venue by a liquor store, the affidavit says. "It's a bar, it's a liquor store, it's a concert. All in one bundle," the document quotes him as saying. It said he noted the bar would be filled with the "evilest people...kuffars." Kuffar is the Arabic term for non-believer.

The affidavit said that shortly after 7pm Friday, Daoud met with the undercover agent in Villa Park and they drove to downtown Chicago, where the restaurants and bars were packed. They entered a parking lot where a Jeep Cherokee containing the phony bomb was parked, the document says.

Daoud drove the vehicle and parked it in front of the bar, then walked a block away and attempted to detonate the device by pressing a triggering mechanism, the affidavit says. He was then arrested.

Court documents don't identify the bar.

READ FULL SOURCE ARTICLE

Editor's Note: We have been saying since before September 11, 2001, that Middle Eastern styled car bombing and terrorism woulod soon be seen on the shores of the United States...from this account, we can only suspect it is a mater of when, not if...


The BasicsProject.org informational and educational pamphlet series is now available for Kindle and iPad. Click here to find out more...

The New Media Journal and BasicsProject.org are not funded by outside sources. We exist exclusively on tax deductible donations from our readers and contributors. Please make a tax deductible donation today.