Two Men Expected to Plead Guilty for Bombing Minnesota Mosque
Twenty-nine-year-old Michael McWhorter and 23-year-old Joe Morris are scheduled to appear no Thursday in US District Court in Minnesota for a change of plea hearing. This typically means the defendants will plead guilty.
The Clarence, Illinois, men face federal hate crime charges and other counts. A third man, 47-year-old Michael Hari, is also charged.
Hari had also reportedly drafted a plan to build a wall along the US border with Mexico, citing Donald Trump's call for such a wall.
The men are accused of attacking Dar al Farooq Islamic Center in August 2017.
And they were arrested in March by FBI agents in Illinois and also charged with possession of assault rifles, which are classified as machine guns, and an attempted bombing of an abortion clinic in Champaign, Illinois on November 7.
McWhorter allegedly said the men did it to scare Muslims from the country. The pipe bomb thrown into the mosque caused damage, but no injuries.
The Dar al Farooq mosque mainly serves Somalis in the Minneapolis area.
Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the country, according to the most recent US Census estimates.
In the Illinois attack, a pipe bomb thrown into a Champaign, Illinois, abortion clinic in November 2017 failed to explode.
Source: TRT World
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