A man charged with supplying guns to men who allegedly plotted to kill U.S. soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army Base has been sentenced to 20 months in prison.
Agron Abdullahu, 25, was sentenced on March 31, 2008, by a federal court in Camden, New Jersey. Abdullahu, an ethnic Albanian born in Kosovo, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide firearms to illegal aliens. He was arrested along with five other foreign-born men after the FBI infiltrated the cell in May 2007. The other men, Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer and brothers Dritan Duka, Shain Duka, and Eljvir Duka, all of Cherry Hill, and Serdar Tartar, of Philadelphia, are charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. military personnel.
Abdullahu, a U.S. legal permanent resident of Atlantic County, New Jersey, admitted to providing firearms on at least two occasions to the Duka brothers, who he knew were illegal aliens, according to court documents. He also admitted that he purchased 2,500 rounds of ammunition to be used by the men.
On two separate occasions in 2006 and 2007, Abdullahu traveled to the Pokonos with the Duka brothers and two undercover FBI informants. The men shot the guns at a shooting range and yelled “jihad” and “Allah akhbar,” according to authorities. Abdullahu also discussed building bombs and buying a rifle with a powerful scope.
The six men had no apparent links to a foreign terrorist organization but were influenced by the ideology of Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, according to authorities. Members of the group reportedly often viewed videos of bin Laden and of terror training or of actual attacks on U.S. military personnel, and evidently took pleasure in watching footage of badly injured U.S. Marines, according to the affidavit. They also expressed willingness to kill and die “in the name of Allah.”
In addition to their planned attack on Fort Dix, the group allegedly conducted surveillance on other military installations – including the Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station and Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and a Coast Guard building in Philadelphia – and considered an attack at the annual Army-Navy college football game in Philadelphia.
