FBI says terrorist group recruited bomber in U.S.

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller said Monday that a U.S.-Somali man who was one of several suicide bombers in a terrorist attack last October in Somalia had apparently been indoctrinated into his extremist beliefs while living in the United States.

The man, Shirwa Ahmed, was the first known suicide bomber with U.S. citizenship. He immigrated with his family to Minneapolis in the mid-1990s, Mueller said, but he returned to Somalia after he was recruited by an extremist group.

"It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota," Mueller said, speaking at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. Minneapolis claims the country's largest Somali population.

Federal authorities have said that Ahmed was one of as many as two dozen young men of Somali descent who had disappeared in the past two years from their homes in the Minneapolis area after being recruited by the Shabab, a militia that is suspected of having ties to al-Qaida and that has waged a war against the Somali government.