Daoud, 25, told the judge he was a naive, gullible and confused teenager when he began a plot to blow up a Chicagoland target. The I-Team also has a video of Daoud driving to downtown Chicago on a September night in 2012, praying for as many people to die as possible.
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"Allah, make us kill lots of enemies. Make international news. Put terror in the hearts of your enemies," Daoud is heard saying as he prays, on a video recording made by the FBI. An undercover FBI agent was driving the car and can be heard praying with him in Arabic.
At this point, the Hillside teenager believed he was going to push the detonator button on a half-ton car bomb outside this downtown bar. It was a law enforcement ruse; the sting ended with Daoud in handcuffs.
"Allah make us successful in the hereafter. If we do not succeed, there will be no one to worship you the way we're worshiping you here," he is heard saying on the grainy recording.
The video capped a several day presentation by federal prosecutors who have been trying to convince Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman that Daoud deserves a 40 year prison sentence. Prosecutor Barry Jonas said that Daoud felt he was on a mission from God, a mission of mass murder.
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Daoud's attorney Tom Durkin told the judge that the government wants her to impose sentence for a mass destruction event created by the FBI.
"They're asking for a sentence for someone who detonated a bomb and they're calling it mass murder," said Durkin. "But they're the ones who came up with the idea of a thousand pound bomb."
Durkin hammered on Daoud's mental state.
"He needed medication. He was unstable. I think that should have been obvious to the government," he said.
As for the government's coup de grace video played today, Durkin told the I-Team after court, "I thought it was horribly unfair for the government to play on his religious beliefs. He obviously had nave, stupid, immature understanding of the Islamic religion and they went right along, played with it. They have the undercover agent praying right along with him."
Reading from a letter, Daoud told the judge that he is sorry for his actions including a brutal attack on a fellow MCC inmate; that he may have been a horrible person in 2012 and that sometimes he laughs at his stupidity. He and his attorney said medication has helped his mental illness. How the judge see's this we will know on Monday afternoon when she is scheduled to reveal Daoud's sentence.