Conspirator turned FBI informant Abdirahman Bashir continued his testimony this morning. Bashir sought to join ISIS in Syria during 2013 along with the defendants. Just before lunch he testified that the FBI told him they would help him get his job back at the airport if he cooperated. What??? Bashir would therefore have been employed at the airport while he was seeking to join ISIS.
Assistant Untied States Attorney just followed up after the lunch break. Bashir testified that he worked at the airport deicing airplanes November 2013 to early 2014. He testified that he never did get his job at the airport back.
Bashir is therefore the second co-conspirator to have held a critical safety job at the airport. The first to have been publicly identified was Abdirizak Warsame, at a pretrial hearing this past December. He worked on the tarmac as a baggage handler and the as a deicer for two different employers. I wrote about Warsame in the Weekly Standard article “Judging the ‘Minnesota men.'”
I have put in a request for information on Bashir’s employment at the airport to the airport’s public affairs officer. He has just advised me to file a freedom of information request with the airport police. He’s making me do it the hard way even though he previously provided me identical information on Warsame. That is pathetic.
I will provide additional information if and when obtained. In the meantime, I just want to add this note as a sidebar to my coverage of the trial to reiterate what a complete and utter joke security at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is, in case you didn’t know.
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