Was this Charlotte man working for the FBI a double agent, giving secrets to ISIS?
Prosecutors say Mohammad al Qatamin tried to play both sides of the War on Terror.
In the end, according to his attorney, the former Charlotte resident may have “signed his own death warrant.”
“I don’t want to be over dramatic, Judge,” federal defender Benjamin Stepp said at Qatamin’s sentencing hearing in April, “but this man is very likely a walking dead man.”
Today, according to government records, Qatamin is confined to a federal prison several states away, serving a 57-month sentence on a legalistic-sounding charge — “falsifying, concealing or covering up by trick, scheme or device a material fact” from the FBI.
For five years, the former cell-phone salesman and repair shop owner served as a bureau informant, gathering what his prosecutors described in court as “truthful, accurate ... and significant” information about the Islamic State, a worldwide terrorist group also known as ISIS.
But in 2017, Qatamin’s mission — or his methods — appeared to change, prosecutors allege. That January, according to court documents, a frantic Qatamin tried to warn two Islamic State operatives of a pending attack by U.S. and Turkish forces on Al-Bab, Syria, an ISIS stronghold.
Qatamin then tried to hide those communications from his FBI handlers, prosecutors allege.
The government says it learned what Qatamin had done only because the two ISIS members he reached out to were actually FBI informants, court documents show.
In May 2018, Qatamin was arrested in Charlotte, where he had lived for about 18 months before his arrest. His case was transferred to a federal court in Spartanburg, S.C., where the Justice Department says his offense occurred and where Qatamin once lived.
‘He screwed up. Hugely.’
According to a transcript of Qatamin’s sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Donald Coggins, Stepp said his client, once freed, faces likely deportation to his Middle-Eastern homeland where retribution for his role as an FBI informant could be waiting. He’s currently scheduled for release in June 2022.
“He’s probably safer sitting in jail than he is out in the street because people that he’s dealt with may get the word that he wasn’t what they thought he was, that he’s an FBI informant or has been,” Stepp told the judge. “... He gets deported. I think we have a pretty good idea what happens to people like that.”
“And yes, he screwed up. Hugely,” Stepp added. “Nevertheless, Judge, he’s got himself in a desperate situation. And whatever the court does is probably nothing compared to what he’s going to have to worry about looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, however long that may be.”
The case, which was first reported by the Daily Beast, offers a glimpse of the country’s shadowy online counter-terrorism efforts to fight threats domestic and abroad, and how informants, undercover FBI agents and possible terrorists mingle and role play under the mask of anonymity — sometimes with life and death consequences.
Qatamin’s experiences “raise a whole lot of questions about how (government agencies) run information,” says Seamus Hughes, co-author of the Daily Beast article and deputy director of the Program of Extremism at George Washington University. “How you balance folks who are trying to give the FBI as much information as possible ... and it speaks to what kind of controls the FBI has in place to handle informants.”
Qatamin’s motives remain a matter of debate. He told the judge that he was not trying to warn ISIS of a pending military assault on a network of escape tunnels leading in and out of Al-Bab. Instead, he said, he was online trolling to hook and reveal a “big fish” in the terrorism network.
The Big Fish in ISIS
He testified in April that he believed the information about the attack that he dangled online was outdated but could still prove his ISIS sympathies to those he was milking for information. He testified that he withheld his dealings from the FBI, at least in part, because he had been chastised in the past for being too aggressive in seeking intelligence.
“I would like to apologize for what happened. And probably I made a wrong call or wrong judgment,” he told the judge, adding: “I’m sure I’m wanted now. And it just ... those people like killing. They believe killing a person like me will get them to heaven or close to the gods.”
Mary Futcher, a counter-terrorism prosecutor with the Justice Department, told Coggins that the information Qatamin used in his online warning was timely and extremely sensitive since it referred to a planned military operation known as “Operation Euphrates Shield.”
“It really was a pending attack,” Futcher said, according to the transcript of Qatamin’s sentencing hearing. “And it was timely because those actions were to occur right at the time that the defendant reached out to the individual he believed was the ISIS fighter in Syria.”
Whether Qatamin was still working on behalf of the FBI or not was, in one sense, irrelevant, Futcher added. Qatamin had the obligation of keeping his government overseers informed.
“The FBI cannot have an individual that is supposedly cooperating ... taking matters into his own hands, deciding what he is going to want to investigate, what he’s going to want to disclose to the FBI ... and then turning around and basically lying about it,” she said.
‘Put the public at great risk’
In his sentencing, Coggins says he had to weigh two sides of the defendant’s past: the Qatamin who was willing “to place your life on the line ... in the service of this country,” vs. his “pattern of deception, whether outright lies or material omission, when the FBI specifically asked you about it.”
The judge continued: “I don’t know that you’re going to get the opportunity to put the public in further danger from this type of crime, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt because of your involvement in this type of intelligence gathering, you have the capacity to put the public at great risk.”
Qatamin’s court proceedings were held against the backdrop of national security and concerns about the defendant’s safety. When Qatamin pleaded guilty in June 2018, Coggins cleared his courtroom of anyone not directly involved in the case.
After Qatamin’s sentencing, according to the transcript, Stepp had one last request to the judge:
Given both his client’s lack of a criminal history and the threat to Qatamin’s safety if the full details of his case came out, might Coggins recommend Qatamin be sent to a lower-security prison where he was less likely to be housed with people who might harm him?
Coggins agreed.
Qatamin has appealed, arguing that his sentence is improperly harsh, given that the court record fails to show that the conviction was “related to terrorism.”
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 10:18 AM.
