Rahatul Khan now faces 15 years in prison.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Rahatul Ashikim Khan, the 23 year-old University of Texas student who was arrested last month under allegations of conspiring with terrorist networks to plot an attack on the US, has pleaded guilty to a single charge of providing material support to terrorists.
Khan’s indictment occurred on Thursday morning, and was announced via press release by the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas. Khan (23) admitted to US Magistrate Judge Mark Lane that he “conspired to provide material support to terrorists” between March of 2011 and January of 2012, and now faces 15 years behind bars for doing so.
“Rahatul Khan’s admissions during this morning’s guilty plea should serve as a sobering reminder that we need to remain vigilant in our efforts to detect and root out terrorism, even in our own back yard,” said US Attorney Robert Pitman, in a statement.
Khan was arrested in mid-June along with another individual named Michael Todd Wolfe, also 23. Both men were accused of using several different online aliases to speak with members of underground terrorist movements in the US and abroad, specifically in Africa and Syria. Wolfe was even accused of saying that he wanted to join ISIS, the terrorist group currently blazing its way through Iraq.
At his hearing on Thursday morning, Khan admitted that he promised to provide a Confidential Human Source (CHS) to an unnamed co-conspirator; this CHS claimed to have been involved with violent jihads in other nations, and Khan intended to recruit this individual to perform terroristic acts in Africa. Law enforcement officials also believed that Khan, the CHS, and the co-conspirator could have been planning attacks against the US, too.
Originally from Bangladesh, Khan was a student at the University of Texas, Austin campus at the time of his arrest. He and Wolfe were nabbed as part of a large-scale sting operation that revealed the men were intent on murdering in the name of Islam; specifically, they named Jews and Hindus as targets of their would-be jihad.
“Great credit is due to the dedicated law enforcement professionals whose tireless efforts contributed to the apprehension of Khan and Michael Wolfe, who pled last week in a separate case to similar charges. National security is, and will remain, the first priority of this office and our law enforcement partners,” Pitman also said.