A teenage ISIS supporter allegedly plotted to travel to Chicago with two others during spring break and kill worshipers at a Shia Muslim mosque, according to federal court records unsealed Friday.
“If they had not encountered law enforcement at that point, they would continue on to another Shia mosque or Jewish synagogue and execute the same plan,” one filing states. “They did not have a plan to escape but rather their plan ended with them being shot by law enforcement.”
Xavier Pelkey, 18, was arrested in February by FBI agents in Waterville, Maine, and charged with possession of unregistered destructive devices.
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Pelkey conspired with an unnamed person in Chicago, along with a third in Kentucky, to mount the terror attack over spring break this month, prosecutors say. The others are not identified in court filings because they are minors.
Targeting a Shia mosque, even by adherents of Jihadi-Salafi Islam—the radical strain on which ISIS ideology is based—is particularly notable, said Bennett Clifford, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
“It’s not uncommon for ISIS supporters to target religious facilities,” Clifford told The Daily Beast. “But most of the time, those targets are churches or synagogues, with synagogues being the predominant target. A shia mosque, despite ISIS’s rhetoric about targeting Shias, is relatively uncommon.”
Clifford also pointed out that the suspects’ ages make this particular case an outlier.
“The average age of all 230-plus people who have been charged since 2014 in ISIS-related cases is about 28,” Clifford said. “The folks in this case are substantially under that threshold, [which is] immediately striking to me.”
The case against Pelkey was set in motion on Feb. 5, when FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home of a 15-year-old boy living in Chicago, according to an affidavit filed by Special Agent Garrett Drew. There, they seized multiple firearms, including a Remington pump shotgun, swords, knives, a bow and arrow, multiple homemade ISIS flags, and multiple electronic devices, the filing states.
The teen, who is identified in the filing as “Juvenile #1,” told agents that he had been communicating online with someone calling himself “Abdullah,” and that they, along with a third person, planned to “conduct a violent attack” at a Shia mosque in the area, according to the affidavit.
“Abdullah and the other individual would travel by bus or train to meet Juvenile #1,” it explains. “Abdullah’s responsibility was to acquire additional firearms and ammunition. Abdullah informed Juvenile #1 that he had built an explosive device, in order to ‘get more people.’”
The plan, according to Juvenile #1, was to get inside the mosque and separate the adults from the children, “then murder the adults,” the affidavit continues. They would then move onto other targets, ending with what has come to be known as “suicide-by-cop.”
Juvenile #1 gave Abdullah’s Instagram handle to agents, who traced the account’s IP address to an apartment in Waterville, Maine. On Feb. 11, the FBI raided the home, where they encountered Pelkey, who confirmed the Instagram account was his.
In a backpack in Pelkey’s bedroom, investigators say they discovered three homemade bombs, along with two hand-painted ISIS flags.
Two days later, FBI agents raided the home of an unnamed 17-year-old boy in Kentucky. Identified as “Juvenile #2,” agents learned that he had also communicated with Pelkey on Instagram as “Abdullah.”
“Abdullah had talked about gathering materials to make fireworks to attack someone,” the affidavit states. “Juvenile #2 also said that Abdullah told him that he wanted Allah to grant him to be a shaheed and die while fighting in the cause of Allah. I know from my training and experience that ‘shaheed’ is an Arabic word that means a martyr in Islam.”
An FBI bomb technician analyzed the explosive devices discovered in Pelkey’s bedroom, and found staples, pins, and thumb tacks inside. This, according to a complaint filed in the case against Pelkey, was meant “to increase the amount of shrapnel propelled by an explosion if the devices were detonated.”
When asked why the fireworks in the improvised bombs were taped together, Pelkey allegedly told agents he wanted to make a “bigger boom,” the affidavit says.
Pelkey’s arrest marks the first ISIS arrest in Maine, according to Clifford.
“If you had told me a couple of years ago they arrested a teenager in Waterville for planning an ISIS attack, I would have been surprised,” he told The Daily Beast. “A lot of these folks come from very different backgrounds and different hometowns where you would not necessarily expect to have this sort of activity going on.”
The explosive devices FBI agents say they found in Pelkey’s apartment looks unlike the ones most commonly seen in U.S. terror cases, which Clifford said usually follow the guidelines set out in Al Qaeda propaganda from the 2010s—which he described as “the pipe bomb method and the pressure cooker method.”
The bombs Pelkey allegedly constructed were “on par with the [scant] technical sophistication that most folks come up with,” Clifford explained. “Most of these folks are untrained and have little experience as bombmakers, they usually either shoot for the moon and fail to [properly] make the device, or they make something like this, a crude device with fireworks taped around it and small items like ball bearings. This is not a high-tech explosive device. It still can be very deadly, but not something that shows…a high degree of technical sophistication about how to construct a bomb.”
The Chicago-based Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for hate crime charges to be brought against Pelkey after his arrest last month.
On Friday, Saadia Pervaiz, a CAIR spokeswoman, told The Daily Beast that the organization’s stance on this has not shifted.
“We continue to see all Muslim-Americans pushed under this monolith of terrorism,” she said. “But terrorism is not Islam, and we want to see hate crime charges pressed against these individuals.”
Radical groups like ISIS “do not reflect at all the values or teachings of Islam,” Pervaiz continued. “These fringe groups have to do with a sociopolitical situation abroad and have nothing to do with the faith, but with politics. They are [wrongly] using faith to justify their politics.”
If convicted, Pelkey faces up to 10 years in prison. Any charges against the two alleged co-conspirators have not been revealed, due to their age. Pelkey’s lawyer, Christopher K. MacLean, did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
