Khalil Abu Rayyan: Jannah Bride

Khalil Abu Rayyan was 21 and living with his parents in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, delivering pizzas for the family shop. Online he was someone else. Through 2015 he shared Islamic State propaganda and watched execution videos, and the FBI noticed. After a woman he had been messaging reported him, the Bureau supplied one of its own.

The persona, “Jannah Bride,” was a 19-year-old Muslim woman sympathetic to the Islamic State who talked of becoming his wife. To her, Abu Rayyan claimed he had bought a rifle, ammunition and a mask to shoot up a Detroit church near his workplace, where no one would be armed, and that only his father finding the gear in his car had stopped him. He told his brother about a martyrdom operation. Searches found no rifle, only a .22 revolver he had bought in October 2015 by lying about his marijuana use, and a Halloween mask from the pizza shop.

He was arrested on February 4, 2016. Prosecutors never charged him with terrorism; the case rested on that false statement and on possessing a firearm while regularly using marijuana. He pleaded guilty to both counts, and in April 2017 a federal judge sentenced him to five years, far above the 15-to-21-month guideline range, citing the danger he posed. The Sixth Circuit upheld the sentence in March 2018. No attack ever took place.