CHICAGO (AP) — A suburban Chicago man snared in a 2013 internet sting is being sentenced for seeking to join an al-Qaida-linked group fighting Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.
There’s a wide gap between the prison terms prosecutors and defense lawyers want for Abdella Ahmad Tounisi at Thursday’s Chicago hearing. Prosecutors want the maximum 15 years for attempting to provide material support to terrorists. The defense wants seven, which, with time served, could mean he’s out in just a few years.
Tounisi was 18 when agents arrested him after he left his Aurora, Illinois, home and went to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2013.
He’d visited a sham extremist website created by the FBI weeks earlier. It invited visitors to fight under “the true banner of Islam.”
Tounisi pleaded guilty in 2015.
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