Uzbek Man Gets 15 Years for Plotting To Kill Obama
The 22-year-old man bought weapons and planned to assassinate the president during his re-election campaign.
| Posted Friday, July 13, 2012, at 4:21 PM
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
A federal judge on Friday handed down a 15-year sentence to a young Uzbek man who had pled guilty to a plot to assassinate President Obama.
The Associated Press reports that the 22-year-old man, Ulugbek Kodirov, moved to New York and later Alabama on a student visa, though he never enrolled in school. Long days at a mall kiosk there led him to seek companionship online, where he became radicalized by Islamic propaganda websites, prosecutors said.
Kodirov eventually contacted an unidentified person to buy weapons, and the person then became an informant, according to the AP. A federal agent sold Kodirov an automatic rifle and grenades in a Birmingham, Ala.-area motel room, and Kodirov later told authorities that he had intended to target the president while he campaigned for re-election. He was arrested last year for threatening to kill the president, material support to terrorism and firearms charges.
Kodirov, who had faced a 30-year term, will likely be deported back to Uzbekistan, a landlocked central Asian nation, when he is released from prison.
