Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) quietly closed its case into the first known terrorist attack by a “border-crossing Muslim migrant” on a Jewish American victim last year without providing answers to questions still concerning the Jewish community impacted by the attack.
On October 26, 2024, Sidi Mohammad Abdallahi, a 22-year-old Mauritanian national, shot multiple rounds while screaming the Islamist terrorist war cry “Allahu Akbar” at a 39-year-old Jewish man who was walking to service at KINS of West Rogers Park synagogue in Chicago.
Abdallahi, who illegally crossed into the U.S. through Mexico in 2023 before making his way to Chicago, engaged in a shootout with police and paramedics before being taken into custody and booked into the Cook County Jail and, on November 30, ended his own life by hanging himself inside the jail.
Bensman, who recently traveled to Chicago to interview the Jewish man who Abdallahi targeted and investigate the case, said the Jewish community in Chicago remains on edge since the attack and has not received answers from law enforcement regarding their concerns.
“[Abdallahi] preplanned this attack methodically. He searched for synagogues in this area, Jewish community centers in this area. He got a weapon. We don’t know how he got a semi automatic handgun…Maybe among the most important things that I learned out of this was that the FBI, I asked them, where were you guys? Why is a major jihadist terror attack in a giant city by a border crosser illegally present not an FBI case? And the answer was, ‘we were in support of the local police department and now that he’s dead, we have closed our case’,” Bensman explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“We don’t know whether they ruled out co-conspirators. The community is telling me that they don’t know if the guy had all kinds of friends out there and they’re biding their time. They said they are scared still,” Bensman added.
Bensman added that he believes the Jewish community’s concerns regarding the shooting and the shooter have not been answered by law enforcement or amplified by local media due to the crime not fitting a specific narrative.
“[The shooting] really shook that community to its core. People want to just avoid and ignore this maybe because they’re Jewish victims. It wasn’t the other way around where Muslims were the victims, where I think that there would have been a lot of different treatment of this case,” Bensman said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
