2021 Kabul airport attacker arrested: Trump

A Daesh operative who allegedly planned the 2021 suicide bombing outside Kabul airport during the chaotic US military withdrawal has been arrested, President Donald Trump has said.

The bomber detonated a device among packed crowds as they tried to flee Afghanistan, killing 170 Afghans and 13 US troops securing the perimeter, days after the Taliban seized control of the capital. In his first address to Congress since returning to the White House, Trump announced on Tuesday that Pakistan had assisted in the arrest of “the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity.”

The Justice Department named the man as Mohammad Sharifullah, also known as Jafar, and said he is expected to appear in a Virginia court on Wednesday.

Sharifullah, who is a leader of the Daesh Khorasan branch in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been charged with “providing and conspiring to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organisation resulting in death.”

The Justice Department said on Wednesday that the operative admitted to FBI Special Agents “to helping prepare” for the attack, “including scouting a route near the airport for an attacker.”

“This evil Daesh-K terrorist orchestrated the brutal murder of 13 heroic Marines,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

Sharifullah also admitted to involvement in several other attacks, the Justice Department said, including the March 2024 Moscow Crocus City Hall attack in which he said “he had shared instructions on how to use AK-style rifles and other weapons to would-be attackers.”

In Tuesday’s speech, Trump took a swipe at his predecessor Joe Biden’s oversight of the “disastrous and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan” and thanked Pakistan “for helping arrest this monster.”

In April 2023, the White House announced that a Daesh official involved in plotting the attack at the airport’s Abbey Gate had been killed in an operation by Afghanistan’s new Taliban government.

Sharifullah was arrested in 2019 by the US-backed Afghan government at the time but escaped from prison on Aug. 15, 2021, as the Taliban took Kabul. The suicide bomber was later identified as Abdul Rahman Al Logari, a Daesh group militant who had been in an Afghan prison but was released by the Taliban as the group took control of the country that summer.

Agencies