Father found guilty of planning machete attack in NY restaurant in New Year’s Eve ISIS terror plot
Father found guilty of planning machete attack in NY restaurant in New Year’s Eve ISIS terror plot
An ex-convict has pleaded guilty in federal court to plotting a New Year’s Eve machete attack at a Rochester restaurant in the name of the Islamic State terrorist group.
Emanuel Lutchman, 26, a married Rochester father of a two-year-old son, pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorism organization, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, U.S. Attorney William Hochul said.
He will be sentenced on November 15 in U.S. District Court in Rochester.
Officials say Lutchman explored websites related to violent jihad and initiated contact with now-deceased Islamic State terrorist Abu Issa Al-Amriki in Syria in December 2015.
Prosecutors say Al-Amriki told him to plan an attack on New Year’s Eve and kill non-believers, or ‘kuffar.’
The FBI says it used paid informants to uncover the plot and take Lutchman to a Walmart store to purchase black ski masks, two knives, a machete, ammonia and other supplies for the attack.
On December 30, 2015, prosecutors say Lutchman made a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in which he said, ‘the blood that you spill of the Muslim overseas we gonna spill the blood of the kuffar.’
Immediately thereafter, agents arrested him.
Lutchman’s family told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle he has a long history of mental problems and was unable to get a job after serving time in prison for robbing a man of his cellphone, bus pass and cigarettes when he was 16.
After his arrest, his father and mother earlier described a man who’d had psychiatric troubles since childhood, had recently stabbed himself in a suicide attempt and, they said, wouldn’t have conducted the attack on his own.
His grandmother said he would never have carried out the attack.
‘The boy is impressionable,’ his father, Omar Lutchman, told NBC News. ‘First he was a Blood, then he was a Crip, then he became a Muslim. He’s easily manipulated.’
The father and the suspect’s grandmother, Beverley Carridice, told the network that Lutchman is married and has a two-year-old son but had been having marital problems.
