ATLANTA — A man convicted of planning to hijack a plane and fly it into an Atlanta high-rise will have to wait two weeks to find out his fate.
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Prosecutors say he wanted to commit a 9/11-style attack on the Bank of America Plaza in midtown.
Cholo Abdi Abdullah’s sentencing was delayed Monday when he asked for new attorneys. His new date for sentencing is April 7.
Prosecutors want to see Abdullah spend life behind bars.
Channel 2′s Candace McCowan reported that it’s still not clear why he wanted to attack the Bank of America Plaza in Atlanta.
“What the government has argued in the documents it submitted to the court is this person needs to be constrained,” said Lynsey Barron, a former federal prosecutor. “We can not trust him ever to be in society again. He was planning to conduct a massive attack and admitted he was intending to kill as many United States citizens as possible.
“If this crime doesn’t warrant life imprisonment, it would be hard to think of what crime would.”
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Online searches by the Kenyan national cholo show he searched for the tallest buildings in Atlanta.
Prosecutors believe the 55-story building was the target of Abdullah’s planned attack.
“What’s particularly awful about this crime is that it was two years in the making,” Barron said.
During that two-year period, prosecutors say Abdullah was an operative of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab and trained with the group, which has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda.
He also went to flight school in the Philippines and was on the cusp of getting his commercial pilot license.
His mother is the one who turned him when learning about his association with the group. Abdullah was convicted in November in the plot to hijack a commercial jet and take down the high-rise.
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