No, he didn’t just work there. More precisely, he had a security clearance and “unfettered access” to airplanes at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, according to Fox News’ local affiliate KMSP-TV.
For obvious reasons, this should concern all of us:
He was the second known American killed while fighting for ISIS in Syria, and the second from Minnesota -- and a Fox 9 exclusive uncovering his employment history is raising a few eyebrows.An airport is probably the last place anyone would want a suspected terrorist to work, but before he died overseas, that's exactly what Abdirahmaan Muhumed did in the Twin Cities. In fact, he may have cleaned your plane at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Before he died, Muhumed left behind a trail of selfies and questions. Who recruited him to join the terror group, and how did he support himself and 9 children? Multiple sources tell Fox 9 News that, for a time, he worked at a job that gave him security clearance at the airport, access to the tarmac and unfettered access to planes.
Two former employees confirmed working with Muhumed at Delta Global Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Airlines. Earlier this year, the cleaning contract was taken over by another company, Airserv. The Metropolitan Airports Commission is in charge of granting security clearances, but a MAC person told Fox 9 News they could not comment on what Muhumed's were due to the ongoing FBI investigation. Instead, they offered to check with Homeland Security to see if they can release any information at all.
As the local affiliate notes, Muhumed's record was clean -- and therefore he had no apparent red flags in his background that would, necessarily, preclude employers from hiring him. But “multiple sources” told KMSP-TV that he had a security clearance of some kind nonetheless. If so, how did he get it and why wasn’t the process to obtain one more rigorous and selective? Perhaps, as Ed Morrissey posits, he didn’t become radicalized until later. This would mean that he didn’t necessarily pose a danger to Americans, as far as we know, when he was first hired. Or perhaps he was just darn good at hiding his ties to radical jihad. Either way, the fact that a defected American once had “unfettered access” to commercial jetliners (maybe even sometimes when no one else was around) should send shivers down our collective spines.
From-the-sky hijackings are terrorists’ preferred method of carrying out mass atrocities. Why else, for example, would a cache of terrorists in Libya steal so many commercial airliners? The ability to use large civilian planes as flying bombs is a tantalizing prospect for bloodthirsty terrorists bent only on killing as many innocents as possible.
Since 9/11, our government has been vigilant in protecting us from these kinds of airborne threats. But with this latest report, vigilance can only go so far: we need to actively root out these traitors to the best of our ability -- and make sure none of them ever work in American airports.