Alexandria, Virginia — A Northern Virginia man targeted in an FBI operation has been convicted on terrorism charges for raising money on his behalf the Islamic State group.
Mohammed ChipaSpringfield, 35, was convicted late Friday afternoon of all five charges against him, including providing material support to a terrorist organization, following a weeklong trial in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. The jury deliberated for about three hours.
Prosecutors said Chhipa met several times with an undercover FBI agent who gave him hundreds of dollars several times in 2021 and 2022, intended for a Syrian woman and member of the Islamic State group known as Umm Dujanah.
Prosecutors alleged that bank records showed Chhipa sent more than $74,000 to the Islamic State group in a similar manner — by personally collecting donations from supporters, converting the money into bitcoin and sending it to bank accounts in Turkey for the group’s use .
Chhipa was particularly interested in sending money to help women from the Islamic State group escape the prison camps to which they were sent after the terrorist group was expelled from territory they controlled in Iraq and Syria, prosecutors said in the opening statements of the trial.
Chhipa’s lawyers had argued that their client was the target of ruthless investigation by the FBI, and preyed on his apparent desire to find a wife by using undercover agents to pose, among other things, as marriage brokers or even as a willing bride.
“The FBI spent ten years investigating Mohammed Chhipa and came up empty. Nothing. So after ten years of bearing no fruit, the FBI decided to create the crime itself,” attorney Jessica Carmichael said during Friday’s closing arguments.
Chhipa has said in the lawsuits what he is now married to Allison Fluke-Ekrenan American from Kansas who is serving a twenty-year prison sentence. Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty last year to organizing and leading the Khatiba Nusaybah, an Islamic State battalion in which about a hundred women and girls learned to use automatic weapons and detonate grenades and suicide belts.
However, prosecutors say the marriage was solemnized online and has no legal status in the US. They say Chhipa, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from India, tried to adopt Fluke-Ekren’s children.
Chhipa will be sentenced in May.