WASHINGTON — An ISIS recruiter was reportedly in regular contact with one of the two men who attacked a Muhammad-cartoon contest in Texas over the weekend.
Brian Ross, ABC News chief investigative correspondent, says that an ISIS “recruiter and inciter” who goes by the name of Miski was “very much goading” Elton Simpson and others in the U.S. over social media leading up to the attack.
“This is a guy who brought to the attention of many Americans that this cartoon event was going to take place, and said, ‘Let’s do something here,’” Ross said in an interview with WTOP Wednesday.
When Simpson tweeted his disapproval of the cartoon contest, Ross reports, Miski tweeted back, “Where are the warriors of this Ummah [community]?” and later, “The brothers from the Charlie Hebdo attack did their part. It’s time for brothers in the #US to do their part.”
The FBI says Miski’s real name is Muhammed Hassan, Ross reports, and that he’s been a fugitive since 2009, when he fled Minneapolis as a teenager to join terror groups in Africa. He’s thought to be in Somalia. He’s been tracked to 16 Americans who have been arrested or have gone on to fight with ISIS overseas, Ross said Wednesday.
“His influence is quite extensive,” David Ibsen, executive director of the Counter Extremism Project, told ABC News. “He’s known as one of the go-to individuals online … individuals who want more information about how to travel to ISIS-controlled territory, who want information about what these radical groups are doing, they go to him.”
Ross went on to say that the FBI had Simpson on their radar, but that he wasn’t considered a threat at the time of the attack. Simpson had been convicted in 2011 of lying to the FBI about going to Somalia to join the al-Qaida-affiliated group al-Shabaaz, but he was only sentenced to probation by a judge who ruled that the FBI hadn’t proven he was going to be part of a terror group.
Simpson was the subject of a new FBI investigation because of his communications about the cartoon event, but still wasn’t under 24-hour surveillance.
“And he was able to get in a car with his roommate [Nadir Soofi], drive a thousand miles to Garland, Texas, and we know what happened next.”
Asked whether anyone at the FBI thinks the attack could’ve been stopped, Ross told WTOP, “They saw the communications, but they had made a judgment that … he was a wannabe person who would never take the final step.”
That’s a decision the FBI has to make every day, Ross added — there are “hundreds of people just like Elton Simpson communicating with people who are overseas with connections to ISIS, with all kinds of wild claims and projections about what they’re going to do, and most of it never happens. In this case, that judgment was not correct.”
There’s no proof that ISIS directly organized or conceived the attack, Ross says, but they claim that “these two were their soldiers — soldiers of the Caliphate, they called them.”
Still, he said, “ISIS often takes responsibility for things they had nothing to do with.”
