Kenyan man sentenced after planning 9/11-style terrorist attack on Atlanta

A Kenyan man was sentenced to life in federal prison after plotting what federal prosecutors called a Sept. 11-style plane attack on Atlanta’s tallest building on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization.

Cholo Abdi Abdullah, 35, was found guilty by a New York City jury in November 2024 on all six counts of conspiracy to hijack a U.S. airliner and crash it into an Atlanta building. He was sentenced to life in prison by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres on Monday.

Abdullah “was a highly trained al-Shabaab operative who was dedicated to recreating the horrific September 11 terrorist attacks on behalf of a vicious terrorist organization,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement. “He will now spend life behind bars, where he will not be able to harm innocent Americans.”

A sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors in March claimed Abdullah had extensively researched the 55-story Bank of America Plaza building in Midtown and planned to fly a U.S. airliner into it.

Federal investigators said Abdullah was an operative for Somalia-based extreme fundamentalist group Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, commonly known as al-Shabab, an affiliated group of al-Qaida, which claimed responsibility for the 2001 attacks on the U.S.

In Somalia, Abdullah trained for months with AK-47 assault rifles and explosives, prosecutors said. He would later move to the Philippines in 2017, where he received years of terror-related training, according to prosecutors. He attended flight school, researched commercial airlines and looked for ways to get into the U.S. so he could hijack a plane and fly it into a skyscraper, they said.

“The defendant’s goals were clear — to bring terror to the United States by commandeering a plane, crashing it into a building, and murdering as many U.S. citizens as possible,” the memorandum states.

According to prosecutors, Abdullah researched transit visas from the Bahamas to Atlanta that made it feasible to hijack a U.S. airliner.

In January 2019, Abdullah searched online for “Delta flights,” “Atlanta” and “Tallest building in Atlanta,” prosecutors said. According to the memorandum, Abdullah later told the FBI that he had researched Atlanta “because it was known to be a busy airport hub with many flights to and from The Bahamas.”

During his online research, Abdullah focused on the Bank of America Plaza on Peachtree Street. The 55-story tower was completed in 1992 and stands 1,023 feet tall at the border of Midtown and downtown, making it the tallest in the Southeast.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon Bodansky told jurors during the trial last year that Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in July 2019 in the Philippines, where authorities found a bomb and bombmaking equipment in his possession ― a discovery that first exposed the alleged plot to authorities, The Associated Press reported. He was indicted in December 2020.

Abdullah represented himself during trial, declining to give an opening statement and not participating in the questioning of witnesses, the AP reported. He was originally scheduled to be sentenced earlier this year.

Attorney Anthony Cecutti was later appointed by the court to represent Abdullah for his sentencing. In a sentencing memorandum filed by Cecutti earlier this month, he said Abdullah accepted responsibility for his actions and expressed regret.

Cecutti argued that it would have been “extremely improbable” for Abdullah to even get a job as a pilot with a commercial airline in the United States like Delta, given the fact he is a Kenyan Muslim and got his commercial pilot license at a flight school in the Philippines.

Abdullah had conducted job searches for Kenya Airways, which is a Delta partner through the SkyTeam airline alliance, prosecutors said.

In the memorandum, attorneys said Abdullah told them that his arrest was “my rescue” because it gave him a way out of al-Shabab. His attorneys said his decision to join al-Shabab was out of idealism and to help liberate oppressed Muslims.

In a memorandum filed in response, the government asked Torres to disregard Abdullah’s attempt to minimize his involvement and his plan to carry out potential attack on U.S. soil.