Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev was both lucky and evil.
His luck was demonstrated when he won admission to the United States through the diversity visa lottery; his evilness, by his stated willingness to assassinate the president of the United States or commit a terrorist attack in New York City — if he could not travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, and if that is what the Islamic State ordered him to do.
When Juraboev was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Oct. 27, 2017, New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill summarized his case in a statement released by the U.S. Justice Department.
“The defendant in this case lived in Brooklyn while making plans to travel to Syria to support a design(at)ed terrorist organization,” O’Neill said. “If that was not successful, the defendant schemed of bombing Coney Island or killing the president of the United States.”
This story starts in 2011.
“Juraboev, a national of Uzbekistan, was admitted to the United States as a diversity visa lottery recipient in 2011,” said a report issued jointly this week by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security.
Three years later in 2014 — according to an Oct. 25, 2017 sentencing letter that then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Bridget Rohde sent to U.S. District Judge William Kuntz — Juraboev “first came to the attention of the government with his online postings on an Uzbek-language social media website.”
The website, according to the U.S. attorney, “propagated ISIS’s ideology and called for its Uzbek-speaking audience to join ISIS.”
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