(JTA) Federal prosecutors have arrested and charged a New Jersey teenager with extremist Islamist views with making the threat that led to a sweeping FBI warning for the state’s synagogues last week.
Omar Alkattoul, 18, of Sayreville, New Jersey, is charged with one count of transmitting a threat in interstate and foreign commerce for an extremist manifesto he shared on Nov. 1 on an undisclosed social media network. He faces up to five years in prison.
Alkattoul had pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS and researched how to obtain firearms and past mass shootings, according to the criminal complaint against him filed Thursday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. The complaint alleges that Alkattoul published a manifesto online that had been written as though he had already carried out an attack.
