A family member of an Afghan national accused of planning to carry out a terrorist attack in Oklahoma on Election Day was charged in France on Saturday with plotting to conduct attacks on a French soccer match or shopping center, according to the Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office in Paris.
Both Afghans are believed to have wanted to carry out the operations on behalf of ISIS, the officials said. It is not known whether they planned to coordinate their attacks in the U.S. and France.
French officials said the Afghan charged there was 22 years old but declined to name him. They also did not identify two other individuals who were also taken into police custody in France for questioning and released.
The Afghan arrested in Oklahoma on Oct. 7, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, was accused of plotting a violent attack with an assault rifle on behalf of ISIS on Nov. 5, the day Americans head to the polls. Court documents said Tawhedi had contributed to an ISIS charity in March and accessed online ISIS propaganda.
Two sources with knowledge of the matter later told NBC News that Tawhedi worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan. Court documents say Tawhedi entered the U.S. in September 2021, about a month after the American military completed its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Former President Donald Trump has accused the Biden administration of not properly vetting the Afghan. A senior Biden administration official said Tawhedi had been screened twice but no derogatory information had been detected.
“Every Afghan resettled in the U.S. undergoes a rigorous screening and vetting process no matter which agency they worked with,” the official said. “That process includes checking against a full range of U.S. records and holdings.”
A plot in France
French law enforcement officials told NBC News that they opened a preliminary investigation into a potential terrorist plot in France on Sept. 27. On Oct. 8, the day after Tawhedi was arrested in Oklahoma, the unnamed 22-year-old Afghan and two other individuals were arrested in the cities of Toulouse and Fronton, in the Haute-Garonne region of southwestern France, where they reside. “The investigations carried out revealed the existence of a planned violent action targeting people in a football stadium or a shopping center instigated by one of them, age 22, of Afghan nationality,” a French law enforcement official said. The official added that investigators found evidence that “establish[es] radicalization and adherence to the ideology of the Islamic State.”
French officials said the 22-year-old Afghan was indicted on Saturday for plotting attacks against civilians and placed in pretrial detention. The two people detained with him were released, but officials said the investigation was ongoing.
In March, police in Germany arrested two Afghans with suspected links to ISIS in connection with a plot to attack the Swedish parliament, Politico reported. The planned attacks were believed to be retaliation against Quran-burning incidents in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.
German prosecutors said the two Afghans planned to attack police officers and others “in the vicinity of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.” The two men also researched “the possible crime scene on the internet and tried several times, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain weapons.”
Questions about U.S. vetting
A central question for U.S. investigators has been when Tawhedi became radicalized. Counterterrorism officials assess that it occurred during the three years he lived in the U.S., according to a senior Biden administration official.
A senior law enforcement official said the FBI is still investigating that question. The CIA declined to comment.
The senior Biden administration official said that Tawhedi passed two rounds of vetting. The official said Tawhedi was first screened before he entered the U.S. on what is known as humanitarian parole in September 2021, about 10 days after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan.
The official said he was vetted again while living in Oklahoma City when he applied for a Special Immigrant Visa. He was eligible for the visa because he had worked for the U.S. government.
Tawhedi was approved for the visa, the official said, but he had not taken the final steps to make it official. Special Immigrant Visas are given to Afghans who worked with the U.S. in Afghanistan after they pass Department of Homeland Security screening.
The screening process includes probing for any possible ties to terrorism, ISIS or the Taliban using data from the applicant’s electronic devices, biometrics and other sources to search the extensive databases the U.S. compiled over 20 years in Afghanistan.
