Prosecutors want 31-year-old Gufran Mohammed to serve the maximum 15 years behind bars for conspiring to support the al-Shabaab group in Somalia and al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Mohammed admitted when he pleaded guilty that he provided about USD 30,000 to the groups, although some of that went instead to an undercover FBI employee posing on the Internet as a terror financing middleman.
Mohammed's attorney, Helaine Batoff, said comparing Mohammed's crimes to other terrorism support cases around the country calls for a lesser sentence of about eight years in prison.
Batoff said Mohammed, who sat silently in shackles during a hearing, was not ready to speak to the judge yesterday. The sentencing was delayed until December 3.
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Originally from India, Mohammed is a naturalised US citizen whose family settled in the Los Angeles area in 2003.
He has a master's degree in computer science from California State University at Los Angeles and decided to take a computer software job in Saudi Arabia in 2011.
Beginning in May 2012, Del Toro said, the FBI had detected the activity through Internet chat rooms frequented by Muslim extremists and the undercover employee began acting as a go-between for Mohammed and the terror groups, this time including the Taliban fighting US forces in Afghanistan.
Said was persuaded through a ruse in 2013 to travel to Saudi Arabia to meet Mohammed, where both were arrested and flown to the US to face the charges.