An illegal immigrant living in Silver Spring spent months talking about blowing up the White House, the Capitol, a Metro station and other targets, a federal prosecutor said during a sentencing hearing on unrelated charges for the native of the former Yugoslavia on Monday.
Brahim Lajqi, 51, an ethnic Albanian, was given five years in prison for his conviction on visa fraud because of recordings the government says it has of him dreaming up terrorist attacks.
U.S. District Court Judge Roger W. Titus granted the government’s request for the enhanced prison sentence with subsequent deportation. Sentencing guidelines called for up to six months in prison, Titus said.
Lajqi, who came to the United States from Mexico in 1984,
pleaded guilty to charges of fraudulently trying to gain lawful residence in the country by lying on immigration forms in 2006, according to court documents.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Welsh said during the sentencing hearing in Greenbelt that Lajqi was recorded by a “confidential human source” saying he wanted to carry out terrorist attacks in retaliation for the United States rejecting his requests for asylum and for its role in the deaths of family members in Kosovo in the 1990s.
Lajqi also spoke of blowing up the Treasury building, the D.C. courthouse where Lajqi’s immigration proceedings had been held and military bases, Welsh said. Lajqi took two trips to the District to scope out the places he wanted to bomb and spoke of having connections that would help him get weapons, he said.
Gary W. Christopher, an attorney for Lajqi, didn’t dispute the authenticity of the audio recordings.
“We’re not here to decide if he said things,” Christopher said in court. “He certainly said things.”
But Christopher said Lajqi, who told the judge he was innocent of wanting to blow up landmarks, turned down the chance to meet an arms dealer, which he said shows Lajqi wasn’t serious in his statements.
Welsh said Lajqi used racial slurs in describing Jews and talked of wanting to “slaughter the enemies of Islam.” He also discussed getting a D.C. hotel room where he could watch the landmarks blow up, the prosecutor said.
Marcy Murphy, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office,
declined to say why Lajqi hasn’t been arrested on terrorism charges.
“We don’t discuss charging decisions,” she said.
Three of Lajqi’s siblings were in the courtroom Monday, telling The Washington Examiner after the hearing
that Lajqi is not a terrorist but instead a garrulous man who never intended to carry out attacks.
“He’s a dreamer,” said Richard Sica, a friend of Lajqi’s from New York. “He’s a talker.”
