CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — The FBI stated Friday it disrupted a New 12 months’s Eve assault plot concentrating on a grocery retailer and fast-food restaurant in North Carolina, arresting an 18-year-old man who authorities say pledged loyalty to the Islamic State group.
Christian Sturdivant was charged with trying to offer materials assist to a overseas terrorist group. Investigators stated he instructed an undercover FBI worker posing as a supportive confidant about his plans to assault individuals. Their on-line messages, together with a latest search of his residence, indicated assaults would happen with knives and hammers, based on prosecutors and data.
Apprehensive Sturdivant would possibly try violence earlier than New 12 months’s Eve, the FBI positioned him beneath fixed surveillance for days, together with on Christmas, U.S. Lawyer for Western North Carolina Russ Ferguson stated.
Brokers had been ready to arrest him earlier if he left his residence with weapons, Ferguson stated at a information convention in Charlotte. “At no level was the general public in hurt’s approach.”
Sturdivant was arrested Wednesday and remained in custody after a federal court docket look Friday. An lawyer representing him didn’t instantly reply to an electronic mail or telephone message looking for remark. One other listening to was scheduled for Jan. 7.
The alleged assault would have taken place one yr after 14 individuals had been killed in New Orleans by a U.S. citizen and Military veteran who proclaimed assist for IS on social media.
The FBI has foiled a number of alleged assaults by sting operations by which brokers posed as terror supporters, supplying recommendation or gear. Critics say the technique can quantity to entrapment of mentally susceptible individuals who wouldn’t have the wherewithal to behave alone.
Searches of Sturdivant’s residence and telephone uncovered what investigators described as a manifesto detailing plans for the assault, FBI Particular Agent in Cost James Barnacle instructed reporters.
Sturdivant “was keen to sacrifice himself,” Barnacle stated.
FBI Particular Agent James C. Barnacle, Jr., heart, U.S. Lawyer for Western District of North Carolina Russ Ferguson, proper, and Mint Hill Police Division Chief Joseph Hatley give a press convention, Friday, Jan. 2, 2026, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photograph/Erik Verduzco)
A handwritten notice present in a trash can at Sturdivant’s residence listed particulars of the deliberate assaults and the variety of supposed victims at a Burger King restaurant and unnamed grocery retailer, based on an FBI affidavit.
The notice additionally stated he would assault arriving officers and “hoped to die by the arms of police.” Ferguson stated the assault was to happen in Mint Hill, a bed room neighborhood of Charlotte.
The affidavit stated a database examine indicated Sturdivant labored at Burger King in Mint Hill. It wasn’t clear if that was the identical restaurant cited within the notice. Ferguson declined to determine the precise focused companies, citing the continued investigation.
If convicted, Sturdivant faces as much as 20 years in jail, based on court docket paperwork.
The truth that Sturdivant encountered two undercover officers whereas allegedly planning the assault ought to reassure the general public, Ferguson stated.
The affidavit says the investigation started final month after authorities linked Sturdivant to a social media account that posted content material supportive of IS, together with imagery that appeared to advertise violence. The account’s show title referenced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the previous chief of the extremist group.
Some specialists argue that IS is highly effective in the present day partly as a model, inspiring each militant teams and people in assaults that the group itself could don’t have any actual function in.
The affidavit says Sturdivant had been on the FBI’s radar in January 2022, when he was a minor, after officers realized he’d been involved with a suspected IS member in Europe, and acquired directions to decorate in black, knock on individuals’s doorways and commit assaults with a hammer.
At the moment, Sturdivant set out for a neighbor’s home armed with a hammer and a knife however was restrained by his grandfather, the affidavit says.
No expenses had been filed at the moment, however Sturdivant underwent psychological therapy and the FBI was instructed he now not had entry to social media, Barnacle stated. However the FBI came upon weeks in the past that he was again on it, he added.
The FBI in Los Angeles final month introduced the disruption of a separate New 12 months’s Eve plot, arresting members of an extremist anti-capitalist and anti-government group who federal officers stated deliberate to bomb a number of websites in southern California.
Different IS-inspired assaults over the previous decade embrace a 2015 capturing rampage by a husband-and-wife group who killed 14 individuals in San Bernardino, California, and a 2016 bloodbath at a homosexual nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who fatally shot 49 individuals
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