He was convicted for accepting thousands of dollars from Islamic State terrorists overseas to carry out an attack in the US.
A man, who received money from a UK-Bangladeshi firm run by a supporter of the Islamic State, has been sentenced to 20 years in jail.
The 33-year-old was given the jail term by a US court on March 30, reports the Baltimore Sun.
He was convicted for accepting thousands of dollars from Islamic State terrorists overseas to carry out an attack in the US.
According to the report, Mohamed Elshinawy had pleaded guilty in August, 2017 to receiving money from the terror group in the summer of 2015.
The case is the only known example of the Syrian group sending money to an operative in the US.
Federal prosecutor Christine Manuelian said Elshinawy was tied to major ISIS figures in the Middle East and Europe, and the FBI in Baltimore did their job by stopping an attack from occurring.
Also Read- Bangladeshi militant used eBay to fund terrorist activities, FBI finds
Earlier in 2017, US investigators claim to have uncovered a global financial network stretching from the UK to Bangladesh that used fraudulent transactions to fund Islamic State schemes.
Siful Sujan, a Bangladeshi-born senior Islamic State figure, ran the suspected network and funnelled money to an alleged IS operative in the US, potentially to fund terrorist attacks, The Wall Street Journal said in a report published in August, 2017.
A lengthy FBI surveillance operation first found clues to the suspected network. It emerged that fake eBay transactions were used to send money to an alleged Islamic State operative in the US.
The FBI arrested American citizen Elshinawy, the recipient of the money, more than a year ago in Maryland.
The FBI affidavit was filed under seal in January, 2017, in support of search warrants requested by federal prosecutors for information from US technology firms on social media and email accounts established by Elshinawy and other suspects, WSJ reported.
Citing an unsealed FBI affidavit, the report said the arrest of several alleged operatives of the network in Britain and Bangladesh has made it one of the most significant suspected financial networks of the terrorist group yet uncovered.
According to the affidavit, the network operated through an IT firm Sujan founded in the UK. The company had offices in Bangladesh and he was also trying to set up a branch in Syria before he was killed. The BBC reported that Sujan left the UK in July 2014 and travelled to Syria.
In December 2015, several key figures of the alleged network were arrested or killed in a coordinated global sweep, the FBI affidavit said. Sujan was IS’ director of computer operations when he was killed in a drone strike on December 10 that year.
Sujan’s company spent $18,000 to buy military-grade surveillance equipment from a Canadian company and ordered electronic bug-sweeping equipment from a US company to be sent to Turkey, the affidavit said.
Elshinawy received a total of $8,700 from individuals associated with IS, including five payments through PayPal from Sujan’s company, according to the affidavit. He told the FBI that he knew the money was meant to conduct a terrorist attack in the US.
Source: Dhaka Tribune.
