Minnesota Islamic State Fan Charged with Threatening to ‘Kill Everyone’ at Drugstore

A 23-year-old Minnesota resident named Abdul Raheem Habil Ali-Skelton, already facing federal charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Islamic State, has been arrested for threatening to “kill everyone” at a Walgreens drugstore.

According to local Fox News affiliate KMSP, the incident occurred shortly before 3:00 AM on Sunday morning at the 24-hour Walgreens drugstore in Brooklyn Park, whose police chief Mark Bruley said his dispatchers could hear Ali-Skelton “yelling through the store’s phone that was going to kill everyone.” In other words, he was using the store’s PA system to deliver his threat.

CBS News elaborates that Ali-Skelton entered the store and “accused a customer of having a relationship with his girlfriend,” then “advanced on the man multiple times and threatened to hit him with a bottle.”

When a store manager asked both men to leave, Ali-Skelton declared he was packing a gun and would “shoot up the place,” then told the manager he belonged to a terrorist organization and was prepared to “blow up” the Walgreens.

Now jailed with $30,000 bail for making “threats of violence,” Ali-Skelton was already on the FBI’s radar for allegedly lying to agents about his contacts with the Islamic State.

As ABC affiliate KSTP News explained last week, Ali-Skelton was interviewed by federal authorities last summer and told them his last contact with Syria-based members of ISIS took place in May or early June of 2015. However, the FBI alleges that he “well knew” he was in contact with ISIS at least a month later than that.

KTSP notes that the federal charges “do not elaborate on how he reportedly made contact with the Islamic State group,” and local stories about this earlier brush with federal law enforcement don’t explain why the FBI wanted to interview him last summer.

The KTSP report seems to rule out one possibility by adding that “court documents do not indicate that Ali-Skelton’s case is connected to the ongoing terror conspiracy investigation that has been unfolding for the last two years in the Twin Cities,” which involves “10 Somali-American men who allegedly attempted to travel to Syria and fight for the Islamic State.”