Minneapolis: An ex-Mayo Clinic research coordinator who wanted to fight for the Daesh terrorist organisation in Syria and had expressed interest in carrying out attacks on US soil was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Friday. The defendant was a Pakistani doctor.

Muhammad Masood, 31, entered a guilty plea to trying to support a foreign terrorist organisation financially a year ago. He allegedly attempted to travel from the US to Syria via Jordan in 2020 but was unsuccessful. He allegedly then decided to fly from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in order to meet someone he believed would be able to help him travel by cargo ship to Daesh territory.

But on March 19, 2020, after he had checked in for his flight, FBI agents detained him at the Minneapolis airport.

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On Friday in St. Paul, US District Judge Paul Magnuson delivered the verdict.

Masood was in the US on a work visa, according to the prosecution. They claimed that beginning in January 2020, he repeatedly swore allegiance to the organisation and its leader to paid informants who he mistakenly thought were members of Daesh. He allegedly expressed a desire to conduct "lone wolf" attacks in the US, according to the prosecution.

According to an FBI affidavit, agents started looking into the matter in 2020 after learning that a person, later identified as Masood, had posted messages on a social media platform that used encryption indicating a desire to support Daesh. Masood contacted a platform informant and claimed to be a doctor with a Pakistani passport who desired to go to northern Iran, Syria, or Iraq close to Afghanistan "to fight on the front line as well as help the wounded brothers," according to the document.

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The Rochester Mayo Clinic's medical centre in southeast Minnesota has confirmed that Masood once worked there, though it claims he was not employed there at the time of his arrest.

In 2014, the Daesh organisation recruited fighters from all over the world and seized control of sizable portions of Iraq and Syria. In 2019, the group lost control of that region. However, despite recent setbacks, United Nations experts stated last week that it still commands 5,000–7,000 members throughout its former stronghold, and that its fighters pose the most significant terrorist threat in Afghanistan right now.

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Terrorist organisations have used Minnesota as a recruiting ground. Since 2007, about 30 Minnesotans, mostly men from the state's sizable Somali community, have left to join militant organisations in Syria such as Daesh or Al-Shabab, an East African affiliate of Al-Qaeda that still controls portions of rural Somalia. Others who planned to join or support those groups have been found guilty of terrorism-related crimes.