A 58-year-old airport worker was charged Friday with allegedly planning a suicide bombing at a passenger terminal at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport in Kansas.
The suspect, Terry Lee Loewen, an avionics technician who lives in Wichita, was arrested earlier in the day as he attempted to use his security pass to drive a vehicle that he thought contained explosives onto the tarmac at the airport, law enforcement officials said at a news conference in Wichita.
In fact, the car contained only dummy explosives. U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom said Loewen spent months developing a plan to drive a carload of explosives to the airport terminal and that he was determined to trigger the bomb himself and die in the blast.
Loewen, who is white, became radicalized after reading extremist Islamic material on the Internet, Grissom said.Notice NBC News tells us Loewen is "white" even though race has nothing to do with whether someone is Muslim, nor with whether they are "radialized".
He Is a Self-Proclaimed 'Jihadist' Dated December 11, 2013, this is the letter Loewen left for a family member. According to the criminal complaint (read full document below), he wanted to martyr himself and "commit an act of violent jihad."
Above you can read the final letter Loewen left for a family member on December 11. The FBI has been tracking the suspect since early 2013 and, around August 2013, Loewen, expressed, "his desire to engage in violent jihad on behalf of al Qaeda." That is when undercover FBI agents began talking to him online in an effort to implicate him in terrorist activity.