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BALTIMORE — A 21-year-old part-time construction worker obsessed with jihad was arrested Wednesday when he tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb at a military recruitment center — the second time in less than two weeks that an alleged homegrown terrorist was nabbed in a sting operation.
Antonio Martinez, a naturalized U.S. citizen who goes by the name Muhammad Hussain, faces charges of attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
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The bomb he's accused of trying to detonate was fake and had been provided by an undercover FBI agent. It was loaded into an SUV that Martinez parked in front of the recruiting center, authorities said, and an FBI informant picked him up and drove him to a nearby vantage point where he tried to set it off.
"There was never any actual danger to the public during this operation this morning," U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said Wednesday. "That's because the FBI was controlling the situation."
Martinez, who had recently converted to Islam, appeared in U.S. District Court in Baltimore Wednesday afternoon and was ordered held until a hearing Monday. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison on the weapon of mass destruction charge and 20 years on the attempted murder charge.
Martinez told an FBI informant he thought about nothing but jihad, according to court documents. He wasn't deterred even after a Somali-born teenager was arrested in Portland, Ore., the day after Thanksgiving in an FBI sting.
The Oregon suspect, Mohamed O. Mohamud, intended to bomb a crowded downtown Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, but the people he'd been communicating with about the plot were FBI agents.
Martinez wondered briefly if he was headed down a similar path, documents indicate.
"I'm not falling for no b.s.," he told the FBI informant when he heard about the Oregon case. He said he still wanted to go ahead, but the informant told him to think about it overnight and call the next day.
An undercover FBI agent they were working with advised the informant to turn the tables on Martinez and make him think the agent did not trust him. Martinez told the informant he planned to assure the agent that he knew "what happened to the brother in Oregon ... we don't work for those people."
In the following days, Martinez reiterated his support for the plan several times, documents show, at one point reassuring the informant that he didn't feel pressured to carry out the plot: "I came to you about this, brother."
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Authorities did not say where Martinez was born or why he converted to Islam.
A former girlfriend, Alisha Legrand, said she met him three or four years ago — before he became a Muslim — and described him as quiet. The two last spoke over the summer and Legrand, 20, said Martinez tried to get her to convert.
"He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn't understand it," she said, adding that he seemed to have his life under control after converting to Islam.
Public defender Joseph Balter cautioned against a rush to judgment.
"It's very, very early in this case," he said.
Asked to identify himself during Wednesday's hearing, Martinez said he was Muhammad Hussain but confirmed that Antonio Martinez is still his legal name. He wore an untucked, white button-down shirt and baggy blue jeans. His curly hair was long and unkempt, and he had sideburns and a goatee.
No one answered the door at his apartment in a tidy, three-story yellow building in a working-class northwest Baltimore neighborhood. LaSharn McDaniels, a 34-year-old nursing assistant who lives in his building, said she didn't know Martinez.
"I need to get to know my neighbors because it's shocking to find out that where I live, there's a terrorist," McDaniels said.
Court documents indicated that Martinez "moved from place to place" because he didn't want anybody to find him. A woman inside an apartment that reportedly belonged to his mother declined to speak with an AP reporter.
His commitment to jihad caused strain in his family, the documents show. The FBI informant reported listening to Martinez during a long conversation with his mother.
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Martinez's Facebook page identifies his wife as Naimah Ismail-Hussain, who describes herself as a student and employee at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Attempts to reach her were not immediately successful.
According to the court documents, the informant first contacted the FBI on Oct. 8 after communicating with Martinez through Facebook, where he had posted notes that alluded to jihad.
"The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease," Martinez wrote in one post.
"Any 1 who opposes ALLAH and HIS Prophet, PEACE Be upon Him, I hate you with all my heart," he allegedly wrote in another.
He picked the military recruitment center because he considered enlisting before he converted to Islam and had been inside, the documents showed.
Martinez allegedly told the source that "all he thinks about is jihad" and that he was hoping to attack Army recruiting centers.
The court documents say he at first thought about getting a gun and firing shots. By late October, Martinez allegedly was talking about building a bomb using propane tanks but had no idea how to build one.
From October to November, the documents say, Martinez approached three people he thought might help, but all turned him down. Law enforcement officials describe the three as "buddies" of Martinez and say they considered him to be unstable.
In mid-November, an FBI undercover agent posing as an Afghani sympathetic to jihad approached Martinez, who allegedly asked him if he knew "how to do something with propane" and that the agent told him it would not take much to make a powerful car bomb.
Rosenstein stressed that Martinez acted alone and that the idea to blow up the military recruitment center was his, not the FBI's. He also noted that Martinez approached four people about the plot. Two declined to help him, one actively tried to dissuade him and the fourth was the informant who turned him into the FBI, Rosenstein said.
White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the arrest underscores the need for vigilance against terrorism and illustrates why the Obama administration is focused on addressing "domestic radicalization."
Authorities said there is no evidence the man is tied to the recent shootings at military recruiting centers in the Washington, D.C. metro area. An unknown person shot at military buildings at least five times between Oct. 16 and Nov. 2. No one was injured in the shootings.
NBC's Pete Williams as well as Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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