The 18-year-old man charged with crimes for allegedly plotting to shoot and kill people at the Mall of America faces long odds in getting acquitted, according to multiple legal experts who spoke with Sahan Journal.
Yet his case does provide some openings for successful defense strategies, some added.
In an interview with Sahan Journal, the father of Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud said his son had undiagnosed developmental delays. And the FBI’s investigation began before he was an adult, raising questions about his predisposition to commit the crime, according to some defense attorneys.
“The fact that the defendant was 16 [when the FBI began its investigation] and had no criminal record at all are important aspects of this case,” defense attorney Earl Gray told Sahan Journal.
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors charged Mohamud with providing, attempting to provide and conspiring to provide material support or resources to a designated terrorist organization.
If convicted, Mohamud faces up to 20 years in prison. According to the criminal charges against him, the FBI had been investigating Mohamud for nearly two years before the arrest, dating to before Mohamud turned 18 and became a legal adult.
Mohamud’s public defender, Manny Atwal, did not return requests to comment for this story.
According to the criminal complaint, Mohamud began exchanging messages with a confidential informant in December 2024, stating his desire to travel to Somalia and join Al-Shabab, the extremist group affiliated with Al Qaeda that controls territory in Somalia. This confidential informant claimed affiliation with the extremist group ISIS. Both exchanged messages on Telegram, Signal, Discord and TikTok until Mohamud’s arrest earlier this month.
Mohamud’s plans changed throughout their 21 months of communication. He switched his allegiance from Al-Shabab to ISIS and decided to carry out an armed attack at the Mall of America instead of travelling abroad because he couldn’t afford to do so, the complaint says. He allegedly planned his attack on Oct. 24, choosing the day because of a planned Hmong Arts Celebration and choosing the mall because of his false belief that it is owned by Jewish owners.
Mohamud aimed to kill between 30 to 60 people and claim he did so for ISIS, according to the complaint.
The confidential informant connected Mohamud to an undercover FBI agent, who posed as a gun dealer and sold Mohamud an AK-47. FBI agents arrested Mohamud in a parking lot on Oct. 8, minutes after the gun sale.
Gray said that in cases like these, prosecutors must prove that the defendant was ready, willing and able to commit a crime.
Mohamud’s possible defense strategies
One potential defensive strategy could be arguing that the federal government’s actions against Mohamud constituted entrapment. In other words, show that the defendant would not have committed a crime without the confidential informant’s guidance. Entrapment is a high bar to prove. Gray, who retired earlier this year, estimates that he won around a dozen entrapment cases in his 56-year legal career. These often involved drug cases.
To Gray, the most important part of successfully arguing entrapment is selecting the right jury, which he argued is getting harder to do because potential jurors rarely admit they can’t be fair.
“Everybody lies,” Gray said. “If they want to be on the jury, they know what to say. They’ve watched enough TV and enough court cases that they know what to say, usually.”
What’s especially hard about an entrapment is it’s one of the rare strategies where defense attorneys have to present proof of their argument instead of establishing doubt over the prosecutor’s arguments, said Amy Sweasy, a former state prosecutor.
A successful entrapment defense must meet two pillars, Sweasy said. First, defense attorneys must show that their client lacked the predisposition to commit the crime. Then, they must prove that the government induced the defendant to commit the crime.
“The defendant has to be somebody who was absolutely never going to commit any kind of a crime unless and until the government got involved,” Sweasy, who now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, told Sahan Journal.
The fact that the government used a confidential informant and an undercover agent in this case is not enough by itself to successfully argue entrapment.
“Law enforcement uses undercover personnel all the time,” she said.
If Mohamud had a mental health issue, that could play into a defense strategy to prove he lacked predisposition to commit the crime, Sweasy said. What could also help is if Mohamud never expressed any support for Muslim extremist groups before his contact with the confidential informant. That part is unclear in the criminal complaint against him, as it makes no references to whether he made such comments online or in person before the federal investigation began.
Outside of any entrapment argument, another defense strategy could involve casting doubt on whether Mohamud purchased the gun solely to carry out the attack, Gray said. Another could be pointing out the alleged plot only involved Mohamud, a confidential informant and an undercover federal agent.
“That’s not a conspiracy,” Gray said. “There has to be two people that are not FBI agents. In other words, if this kid had another kid with them that was going to go along [with the attack], then you’ve got a conspiracy. But if it’s just you and the FBI agent, that’s not an agreement to commit a crime, because obviously the FBI agent is not going to commit a crime.”
How the FBI conducts counterterrorism investigations
Legal experts agreed that one of the biggest things that could weigh against Mohamud is the FBI’s apparent attempt in summer 2025 to interview Mohamud. According to the complaint, FBI agents visited his home and spoke to Mohamud’s mother, who said he wasn’t home but on his way home from school. They also called his father, who declined to provide information about Mohamud, according to the charges.
In the early 2010s, the FBI started giving some targets of terrorism investigations off-ramps to stop them before they go forward with a crime, said Javed Ali, a former FBI agent who did counterterrorism work and now teaches public policy at the University of Michigan.
“It was seen as an option, especially for young people, to give them a potential to back out of this pathway they were heading on before they crossed the line where things got really bad,” Ali told Sahan Journal.
That line is when the target goes from talking about a violent attack to beginning to plot it outright. If a target of an investigation takes the FBI up on the offer, they could typically be required to attend counseling and social services to “get those ideas out of their head,” Ali said.
“When it doesn’t work, it shows the depth of their radicalization,” he said.
Typically counterterrorism investigations such as the one against Mohamud start with the FBI getting a tip about the suspect, Ali said. That could be from a social media company flagging online posts the person made, or it could be from someone in the person’s life.
“It’s not like the FBI is passively sitting on social media sites and just looking for that inflammatory sort of rhetoric,” Ali said.
Mohamud’s criminal charges do not specify or explain whether someone tipped the FBI off about him.
After the FBI receives a tip, they decide whether there’s enough evidence or cause to open an investigation into the person, Ali said.
If there is, the next step can involve assigning a confidential informant to the person to get information. The confidential informant is not a direct employee of the FBI, but is rather a civilian working with the FBI. Sometimes they can be someone from the person’s social circle recruited by the FBI.
The next and final step is providing the person with the capability to carry out the attack. In Mohamud’s case, it’s when the undercover agent sells him the gun. Once the person willingly accepts the gun, it’s a furtherance of the conspiracy, Ali said, and an arrest follows right after.
“This whole process can happen in a matter of weeks, sometimes it can happen in a matter of months, and in this case it took a little longer,” Ali said.
Mohamud’s father speaks
In an interview with Sahan Journal, Abdullahi Mohamud Warfa, Sheikhdoon’s father, said he and the boy’s mother split up shortly after he was born in 2008. His mother remarried again in 2014, and with the arrival of the children’s second stepfather also came familial strife.
According to Warfa, the second stepfather had a profound controlling effect over his ex-wife and two sons, dictating how she dressed and preventing the sons from calling their father, claiming he was their only father now. Warfa also alleged the stepfather was abusive, describing one incident where neighbors called him following an altercation between the stepfather and Warfa’s older son. Warfa called the police and child protection services got involved, which initiated court proceedings over custody.
Warfa said that while he had temporary custody of his two sons for a year as the proceedings were ongoing, he moved from Seattle to Ohio with them, which was when he noticed Sheikhdoon had previously unaddressed speech and developmental delays.
“I brought them with me to Ohio, they lived with me for a year and I would take them to school and pick them up,” he said. “With my younger son, that was when I saw he was a bit slower. When you would ask him a question, it would take him three to four minutes to provide an answer.”
Warfa claims that during the proceedings was when his mother was told of Sheikhdoon’s developmental delays and possible autism spectrum disorder, and that he would need speech therapy and other treatment. But shortly after the proceedings, Warfa said the stepfather and the kids’ mother pulled the children out of public school and decided to homeschool them.
“This God-given condition is being ignored and refused to be acted on,” Warfa said. “They were scared not of the state, the law or God but rather if so-and-so or a neighbor says ‘your kid has autism.’”
Sheikhdoon’s mother declined to comment, citing guidance from her attorney.
For nearly three years, Warfa said, the kids were homeschooled, and communication with his sons during that time was nonexistent. Then in 2016, he abruptly received a call while driving a truck through Dallas, Texas, that the couple was divorcing and the kids and their mother would be moving to Africa.
Warfa said they lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where the two boys were in boarding school for three years and communication significantly improved. That was until 2024 when, again, the kids’ mother abruptly moved them back to the United States — first to Seattle briefly then to Minnesota.
Shortly after coming back stateside was when his parents learned about what he was posting online.
Warfa said federal agents visited Sheikhdoon and his mother, showing her his online posts and cautioning her to monitor his activity. When the agents asked to speak with his father, Warfa claims the mother provided contact information of the stepfather in Seattle, not him. The indictment alleges agents tried to reach Sheikhdoon’s father, an individual with the same initials as Warfa, but that the individual directed all questions to his attorney.
Warfa claims he didn’t learn about his son’s online activity until this past summer, when he came to visit his sons and convince Sheikhdoon to move to Ohio with him in order to seek treatment for his developmental delays and monitor his internet use. He was successful, and Sheikhdoon went back to Columbus with him in June.
He said Sheikhdoon quickly called his mother and complained, and his mother told Warfa to bring her son back to Minnesota. He said he tried to convince her he needs to stay in Ohio, where he could not only get him treatment but keep an eye on his online activity, but she said the boy threatened to walk back to Minnesota from Ohio if he had to stay any longer.
“I told her this boy needs a male role model, he needs his father and he needs help,” he said. “I told him ‘just stay, we’ll take you to get treatment, you’re not well’ and he replied with ‘you know I’m 18 years old now.’”
Within a week of his son returning to Minnesota, Warfa said he had access to the internet again. Shortly after that, Warfa was in the hospital seeking treatment for a spinal condition, when he saw his son’s mugshot appear on the hospital waiting room TV.
