Teenager charged with trying to blow up bar in Chicago

Associated Press

CHICAGO

Undercover FBI agents arrested an 18-year-old American man who tried to detonate what he believed was a car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, federal prosecutors said Saturday.

Adel Daoud, a U.S. citizen from the Chicago suburb of Hillside, was arrested Friday night in an undercover operation in which agents pretending to be terrorists provided him with a phony car bomb.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, which announced the arrest Saturday, said the device was harmless and the public was never at risk.

Daoud is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to damage and destroy a building with an explosive.

Someone who answered a call to Daoud’s home in Hillside on Saturday, who said her name was Hiba and that she was Daoud’s sister, declined to discuss Daoud, the family or the arrest.

“We don’t even know anything. We don’t know that much. We know as little as you do,” she said. “They’re just accusations.”

“We’d like to be left alone,” she said.

The FBI began monitoring Daoud after he posted material online about violent jihad and the killing of Americans, federal prosecutors said.

In May, two undercover FBI agents contacted Daoud in response to the postings and exchanged several electronic messages with him in which he expressed an interest in engaging in violent jihad in the United States or abroad, according to an affidavit by an FBI special agent.