Telangana engineer convicted in US for raising money for Al Qaeda leader deported

Ibrahim Mohammad, who was deported from the United States, has been sent to a quarantine facility after he landed in Amritsar on Wednesday

Updated on: May 21, 2020, 21:21:20 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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A 40-year-old engineer from Telangana capital Hyderabad who had been convicted for terror financing has been deported by the United States after completing his prison term, a government official said.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to charges of terror financing. The judge had ordered that he should be deported after completing the prison term

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad was arrested in 2011 for providing material support to al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki two years earlier.

Ibrahim Mohammad was sentenced to five years in jail after he pleaded guilty to his role in the conspiracy, His brother Yahya Mohammad was sentenced to 27 years because he had also hired a hitman to kill a judge presiding over a terror case.

A government official told Hindustan Times that Ibrahim Mohammad landed in Amritsar on Wednesday along with other Indian nationals deported from the United States. He has been sent to a quarantine facility for 14 days and will be extensively questioned by Indian security officials to ascertain any possible terror links in India.

Sharjah-born Zubar Mohammad graduated in engineering from Osmania University in 2001 and followed his elder brother Yahya Farooq Mohammad to the United States for higher studies. He studied engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2001 through 2005, moved to Toledo in Ohio around 2006 and married.

Indian security officials who have questioned Ibrahim Mohammad said he appeared to have been self-radicalised after watching videos of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki.

When his brother shifted to Dubai, he used the address proof of Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad in the USA for bank transactions. His brother told Imrahim Mohammad to collect cheques from his two Pakistani associates Sultan Salim and Asif Salim and deposited it into his brother’s account.

Between 2004 and 2009, approximately 50-60 transactions were made by Ibrahim Mohammad in his brother Yahya Farooq Mohammad’s account.

In 2009, Yahya Farooq Mohammad set out to meet Awlaki. When they could not reach him, they decided to meet one of Awlaki’s associates in Yemen’s Sanaa. According to US court documents, handed over $22,000 to be passed on to Awlaki to carry out terror attacks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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