Minnesota
Man charged with trying to join the Islamic State group
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minneapolis man who allegedly expressed admiration for the truck attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people has been accused of trying to join the Islamic State group, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan, 22, made his first court appearance on a charge of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was ordered held without bail until a detention hearing March 5.
The chief federal defender for Minnesota, Katherian Roe, said her office will represent him but declined to comment on the case.
The criminal complaint against Hassan, a naturalized U.S. citizen, alleges that he tried twice in December to travel from Minnesota to Somalia to join the group but did not succeed. It says he claimed he was going to visit family but had none there.
Prosecutors said the FBI’s investigation established that Hassan expressed public support for the group in multiple posts on social media and also praised Shamsud-Din Jabbar on TikTok over the New Orleans attack.
Investigators say Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas native and U.S. Army veteran, posted videos professing allegiance to the Islamic State group and an intent to harm others before he plowed a pickup through a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street on Jan. 1. Police fatally shot him during an exchange of gunfire at the scene.
Hassan also allegedly posted a video last week, of himself driving while holding an Islamic State group flag inside his vehicle. The FBI said it also observed him driving with the flag Wednesday. He was arrested on Thursday.
The charging documents also say police in New York notified the FBI last May that Hassan had made social media posts in support of the Somali group al-Shabab. An affidavit from an agent says investigators spotted al-Shabab and Islamic State group propaganda videos on his TikTok and Facebook accounts. It also alleges that he exchanged messages with a Facebook account that encourages Somali-speaking individuals to travel and fight on behalf of the Islamic State group.
FBI agents were watching when Hassan went to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Dec. 13, authorities say. He allegedly tried to check in for a flight to Somalia but left after an airline employee told him he lacked required travel documents.
He allegedly tried again Dec. 29. Agents saw him board a flight to Chicago, where Customs and Border Protection officers interviewed him extensively before his scheduled flight to Ethiopia but did not detain him. He missed the flight and returned to Minneapolis, the affidavit says.
Hassan is the latest of several Minnesotans suspected of leaving or trying to leave the U.S. to join the Islamic State group in recent years, along with thousands of fighters from other countries. In 2016 nine Minnesota men were sentenced on federal charges of conspiring to join the group, and a Minnesotan who actually fought for the group in Iraq was sentenced last June to 10 years in prison.
Tennessee
Gynecologist charged with performing unnecessary medical procedures
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee gynecologist was arrested Friday and accused of performing unnecessary procedures on patients with re-used medical devices held under unsanitary conditions.
Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, 44, is charged with enticing four people to travel interstate to engage in illegal sexual activity, adulteration of medical devices, misbranding of medical devices and health care fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Memphis said.
Court records did not show if Kumar has a lawyer to represent him on the charges or speak on his behalf. There was no immediate response to a phone message left with his office.
Kumar’s medical practice is located in Memphis. From September 2019 to June 2024, Kumar is alleged to have sexually abused women by conducting unnecessary medical procedures with devices held under unsanitary conditions and re-used on patients when they were required to be thrown away or properly reprocessed.
Kumar did not tell patients that he was re-using the devices, prosecutors said, and also billed Medicare and Medicaid as if the procedures were necessary and as if he had used a new or properly reprocessed device each time.
Acting U.S. Attorney Fondren said Kumar was consistently the top-paid provider in Tennessee for Medicare and Medicaid for hysteroscopy biopsies, which allow doctors to look inside the uterus.
Federal authorities said there could be more patients affected by Kumar’s alleged acts.
“The allegations indicate that Kumar acted as a predator in a white coat and used the cover of conducting medical examinations to put his patients at risk and enrich himself,” Fondren said in a statement.
Virginia
Cop who killed shoplifting suspect sentenced to 3 years on firearm charge
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A former Virginia police sergeant was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday after he fatally shot a man accused of stealing sunglasses from a shopping center.
Wesley Shifflett, 36, was convicted by a northern Virginia jury in October of reckless handling of a firearm in connection to the February 2023 shooting of Timothy McCree Johnson. In a split verdict, the jury acquitted Shifflett of involuntary manslaughter in Johnson’s killing.
Judge Randy Bellows in Fairfax County Circuit Court sentenced Shifflett to five years in prison and suspended two years in the felony case.
“Trust in policing is essential to community safety,” Democratic Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano said Friday. “When tragedies like this occur, trust can only be repaired by seeking accountability through the justice system, and failing to do so would make the work of our police force –- who are as dedicated to community safety as I am –- that much harder.”
Shifflett’s defense attorney said that he planned to appeal the case, according to NBC4.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Shifflett, then a sergeant with Fairfax County police, acted recklessly when he shot and killed Johnson after a short foot chase outside Tysons Corner Center that night. Shifflett testified that he shot Johnson in self-defense after he saw the victim reaching into his waistband after falling down during the chase.
The dimly lit bodycam video played during his trial shows Shifflett yelling “get on the ground” before firing two shots at Johnson, who was 37 at the time. After the shots were fired, Shifflett immediately shouted “stop reaching” and told other officers that he saw Johnson reaching in his waistband.
The video also shows Johnson’s dying words, saying “I wasn’t reaching for nothing. ... I’m shot, and I’m bleeding.”
Melissa Johnson, the victim’s mother, said she felt a sigh of relief following Shifflett’s sentencing.
“I think it’s a testament to what you can do with faith, even if it’s just the size of the grain of a mustard seed,” she said. “It felt like a David and Goliath moment. With one smooth pebble, we took on the giant blue wall.”
New York
Mexican drug lord pleads not guilty in 1985 killing of US federal agent
NEW YORK (AP) — After years as one of U.S. authorities’ most wanted men, Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a U.S. federal agent.
The White House called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world” in a statement before his arraignment, where more than 100 Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other federal officials filled a large ceremonial courtroom.
Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, the 72-year-old Caro Quintero spoke little during the brief proceeding as his lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Another cartel leader, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, 62, also pleaded not guilty through an attorney. He’s accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, whose killing was dramatized in the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.”
Prosecutors say Caro Quintero blamed Camarena for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation and had the agent kidnapped, tortured and killed as revenge.
“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope — hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” Camarena’s family said Friday in a statement thanking President Donald Trump and everyone who worked on the case.
Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent Thursday to eight U.S. cities. The move came as Mexico sought to stave off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports next week. In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.
Members of Mexico’s Security Cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.
“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”
Caro Quintero has long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition. As head of the Guadalajara cartel, the “Narco of Narcos” and his partners “pioneered drug trafficking routes to Columbia, Mexico and into the United States,” Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney John Durham said outside court.
An indictment accuses Caro Quintero of presiding over a sprawling criminal network responsible for channeling tons of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana and cocaine into the U.S.
He was 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his sentence in 2013. Mexico’s Supreme Court later upheld it, but by then, Caro Quintero had been released and was in the wind. Authorities said he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.
Caro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs.”
“I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again,” he said, according to the newspaper.
The U.S. added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20 million reward. Washington sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest, which happened days after a White House meeting between then-President Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The extradition request stalled as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the U.S. to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.
In January, a nonprofit group representing the Camarena family asked the new Trump administration to renew the extradition request.
Frank Tarentino III, special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York office, on Friday called Camarena a “symbol of strength, honor, and determination.”
Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies,” who died in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “The Viceroy,” continued the brothers’ business until his arrest in 2014.
He was sentenced in Mexico in 2021 to 28 years in prison.
U.S. prosecutors say his Juarez cartel brought tons of cocaine into the country. But his lawyer, Kenneth Montgomery, took aim Friday at any notion that Carrillo Fuentes is responsible for the flow of drugs into the U.S, saying it began before he took power and continued long after his arrest.
Man charged with trying to join the Islamic State group
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minneapolis man who allegedly expressed admiration for the truck attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people has been accused of trying to join the Islamic State group, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
Abdisatar Ahmed Hassan, 22, made his first court appearance on a charge of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was ordered held without bail until a detention hearing March 5.
The chief federal defender for Minnesota, Katherian Roe, said her office will represent him but declined to comment on the case.
The criminal complaint against Hassan, a naturalized U.S. citizen, alleges that he tried twice in December to travel from Minnesota to Somalia to join the group but did not succeed. It says he claimed he was going to visit family but had none there.
Prosecutors said the FBI’s investigation established that Hassan expressed public support for the group in multiple posts on social media and also praised Shamsud-Din Jabbar on TikTok over the New Orleans attack.
Investigators say Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas native and U.S. Army veteran, posted videos professing allegiance to the Islamic State group and an intent to harm others before he plowed a pickup through a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street on Jan. 1. Police fatally shot him during an exchange of gunfire at the scene.
Hassan also allegedly posted a video last week, of himself driving while holding an Islamic State group flag inside his vehicle. The FBI said it also observed him driving with the flag Wednesday. He was arrested on Thursday.
The charging documents also say police in New York notified the FBI last May that Hassan had made social media posts in support of the Somali group al-Shabab. An affidavit from an agent says investigators spotted al-Shabab and Islamic State group propaganda videos on his TikTok and Facebook accounts. It also alleges that he exchanged messages with a Facebook account that encourages Somali-speaking individuals to travel and fight on behalf of the Islamic State group.
FBI agents were watching when Hassan went to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Dec. 13, authorities say. He allegedly tried to check in for a flight to Somalia but left after an airline employee told him he lacked required travel documents.
He allegedly tried again Dec. 29. Agents saw him board a flight to Chicago, where Customs and Border Protection officers interviewed him extensively before his scheduled flight to Ethiopia but did not detain him. He missed the flight and returned to Minneapolis, the affidavit says.
Hassan is the latest of several Minnesotans suspected of leaving or trying to leave the U.S. to join the Islamic State group in recent years, along with thousands of fighters from other countries. In 2016 nine Minnesota men were sentenced on federal charges of conspiring to join the group, and a Minnesotan who actually fought for the group in Iraq was sentenced last June to 10 years in prison.
Tennessee
Gynecologist charged with performing unnecessary medical procedures
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee gynecologist was arrested Friday and accused of performing unnecessary procedures on patients with re-used medical devices held under unsanitary conditions.
Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, 44, is charged with enticing four people to travel interstate to engage in illegal sexual activity, adulteration of medical devices, misbranding of medical devices and health care fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Memphis said.
Court records did not show if Kumar has a lawyer to represent him on the charges or speak on his behalf. There was no immediate response to a phone message left with his office.
Kumar’s medical practice is located in Memphis. From September 2019 to June 2024, Kumar is alleged to have sexually abused women by conducting unnecessary medical procedures with devices held under unsanitary conditions and re-used on patients when they were required to be thrown away or properly reprocessed.
Kumar did not tell patients that he was re-using the devices, prosecutors said, and also billed Medicare and Medicaid as if the procedures were necessary and as if he had used a new or properly reprocessed device each time.
Acting U.S. Attorney Fondren said Kumar was consistently the top-paid provider in Tennessee for Medicare and Medicaid for hysteroscopy biopsies, which allow doctors to look inside the uterus.
Federal authorities said there could be more patients affected by Kumar’s alleged acts.
“The allegations indicate that Kumar acted as a predator in a white coat and used the cover of conducting medical examinations to put his patients at risk and enrich himself,” Fondren said in a statement.
Virginia
Cop who killed shoplifting suspect sentenced to 3 years on firearm charge
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A former Virginia police sergeant was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday after he fatally shot a man accused of stealing sunglasses from a shopping center.
Wesley Shifflett, 36, was convicted by a northern Virginia jury in October of reckless handling of a firearm in connection to the February 2023 shooting of Timothy McCree Johnson. In a split verdict, the jury acquitted Shifflett of involuntary manslaughter in Johnson’s killing.
Judge Randy Bellows in Fairfax County Circuit Court sentenced Shifflett to five years in prison and suspended two years in the felony case.
“Trust in policing is essential to community safety,” Democratic Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano said Friday. “When tragedies like this occur, trust can only be repaired by seeking accountability through the justice system, and failing to do so would make the work of our police force –- who are as dedicated to community safety as I am –- that much harder.”
Shifflett’s defense attorney said that he planned to appeal the case, according to NBC4.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Shifflett, then a sergeant with Fairfax County police, acted recklessly when he shot and killed Johnson after a short foot chase outside Tysons Corner Center that night. Shifflett testified that he shot Johnson in self-defense after he saw the victim reaching into his waistband after falling down during the chase.
The dimly lit bodycam video played during his trial shows Shifflett yelling “get on the ground” before firing two shots at Johnson, who was 37 at the time. After the shots were fired, Shifflett immediately shouted “stop reaching” and told other officers that he saw Johnson reaching in his waistband.
The video also shows Johnson’s dying words, saying “I wasn’t reaching for nothing. ... I’m shot, and I’m bleeding.”
Melissa Johnson, the victim’s mother, said she felt a sigh of relief following Shifflett’s sentencing.
“I think it’s a testament to what you can do with faith, even if it’s just the size of the grain of a mustard seed,” she said. “It felt like a David and Goliath moment. With one smooth pebble, we took on the giant blue wall.”
New York
Mexican drug lord pleads not guilty in 1985 killing of US federal agent
NEW YORK (AP) — After years as one of U.S. authorities’ most wanted men, Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a U.S. federal agent.
The White House called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world” in a statement before his arraignment, where more than 100 Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other federal officials filled a large ceremonial courtroom.
Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, the 72-year-old Caro Quintero spoke little during the brief proceeding as his lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Another cartel leader, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, 62, also pleaded not guilty through an attorney. He’s accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, whose killing was dramatized in the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.”
Prosecutors say Caro Quintero blamed Camarena for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation and had the agent kidnapped, tortured and killed as revenge.
“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope — hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” Camarena’s family said Friday in a statement thanking President Donald Trump and everyone who worked on the case.
Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent Thursday to eight U.S. cities. The move came as Mexico sought to stave off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports next week. In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.
Members of Mexico’s Security Cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.
“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”
Caro Quintero has long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition. As head of the Guadalajara cartel, the “Narco of Narcos” and his partners “pioneered drug trafficking routes to Columbia, Mexico and into the United States,” Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney John Durham said outside court.
An indictment accuses Caro Quintero of presiding over a sprawling criminal network responsible for channeling tons of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana and cocaine into the U.S.
He was 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his sentence in 2013. Mexico’s Supreme Court later upheld it, but by then, Caro Quintero had been released and was in the wind. Authorities said he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.
Caro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs.”
“I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again,” he said, according to the newspaper.
The U.S. added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20 million reward. Washington sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest, which happened days after a White House meeting between then-President Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The extradition request stalled as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the U.S. to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.
In January, a nonprofit group representing the Camarena family asked the new Trump administration to renew the extradition request.
Frank Tarentino III, special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York office, on Friday called Camarena a “symbol of strength, honor, and determination.”
Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies,” who died in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “The Viceroy,” continued the brothers’ business until his arrest in 2014.
He was sentenced in Mexico in 2021 to 28 years in prison.
U.S. prosecutors say his Juarez cartel brought tons of cocaine into the country. But his lawyer, Kenneth Montgomery, took aim Friday at any notion that Carrillo Fuentes is responsible for the flow of drugs into the U.S, saying it began before he took power and continued long after his arrest.
