Mohammed Warsame

Mohamed Abdullah Warsame (born August 12, 1973 ) is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in 2003 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Minneapolis. He was accused of attending an Afghan training camp and fighting alongside Taliban forces in the country, and was charged with conspiring to provide support to terrorists.

Life Warsame emigrated to Canada from Somalia in 1989. While she lived in Minneapolis, Warsame continued to live and work in Toronto, travelling to the United States twice for three-month periods to stay with his wife.

In early 2001, Warsame asked a militant leader whether the organisation would pay to bring his wife and child from the United States. He was told that he was instead being asked to leave and that the group would pay for his April airfare back to Canada.

He was transferred to New York City

According to his lawyers, the nearly six-year delay before his trial was the longest period that anyone had been held without trial in American history. On May 20, 2009, federal prosecutors announced that Warsame had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to support al-Qaeda, with the remaining charges dismissed.

In May 2009, Warsame entered into a plea agreement. but maintained that he did not go to Afghanistan intending to engage in jihad. Instead, he believed he would find a kind of Muslim utopia. His lawyers stated that he became disillusioned and wished to return to North America but lacked the funds to do so. He attended the camp because food was provided there. They further argued that although he sent money to an individual he had met at the camp, it was not a donation; rather, he was repaying a loan that had enabled him to return to Canada.

Namesakes

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, another Minneapolis resident named "Mohamed Warsame" — Ahmed Mohamed Warsame — experienced a delay of more than two years in his application for U.S. citizenship because he shared a name with Mohamed Warsame.

Ahmed Warsame was also born in Somalia. He emigrated to the United States at age 17 in 1995 and completed his high school education in Minneapolis, where he had lived since.

Marilu Cabrera, an immigration official, attributed the delay in processing Warsame's citizenship application to a backlog in FBI fingerprint checks. She stated that 30,000 fingerprint-check requests submitted in May 2006 were not processed until 2008.