FBI undercover agent asked Chicago terror subject Adel Daoud to provide target list

ByChuck Goudie, Barb Markoff and Christine Tressel WLS logo
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
FBI undercover agent asked Chicago terror subject Adel Daoud to provide target list
Chuck Goudie and the I-Team report on the dozens of locations on Adel Daoud's prospective hit list of targets, including Woodfield Mall.

A chilling list of possible Chicago area terror targets put together by a would-be Jihadist was center stage in Chicago federal court on Tuesday.

Adel Daoud was arrested in a 2012 FBI sting and is now being sentenced in federal court.

The prospective hit list that Daoud handed to an undercover FBI agent had dozens of targets-any one of which he was apparently interested in attacking-including the sprawling Woodfield Mall in northwest suburban Schaumburg-the largest mall in Illinois. Daoud's potential targets included bars, restaurants, military recruiting offices and suburban service clubs.

It was a downtown bar that Daoud thought he was going to blow up with a half-ton car bomb in September 2012, according to the FBI.

But testimony Tuesday from the undercover FBI agent who worked with Daoud was that the Hillside teenager's list of possible targets was deeper than the one Loop bar.

According to the FBI, the 2012 hit list included Chicago's historic Music Box Theatre on the north side along with several popular restaurants and bars.

Another on the list was in west suburban Hinsdale, the local Masonic Lodge in the village downtown and in neighboring Western Springs, their Masonic Lodge. Daoud apparently believed that Freemason's controlled the nation and deserved to be taken down. Officials with both Masonic Lodges in Hinsdale and Western Springs have told the I-Team that authorities never notified them they were a possible Daoud target

There was Woodfield Mall on the list, and military recruiting offices around Chicago.

"It's a very dramatically serious, dangerous looking list" Daoud's attorney Thomas Durkin said "if it was something that Daoud-if they found in a search warrant in Daoud's desk-as if he was planning that."

Durkin told the I-Team that Daoud was asked by the FBI agent "to make a list of places he might want to do something at because he didn't know what to do."

After seven years in custody, Daoud filed a special legal plea that allows him to plead guilty, without admitting guilt.

This week U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman is determining Daoud's sentence. The government wants 40-years and prosecutors are presenting some of the evidence they would have used at trial.

In undercover recordings played Tuesday a giddy teenage Daoud is heard badmouthing various ethnic groups and touting the use of flying cars in his terror attacks.

Daoud's family, the media and spectators were moved out of the courtroom and had to watch a nondescript video feed of the undercover agent's testimony-because he is apparently still working undercover cases.

READ: Government Sentencing Exhibits

Exhibit UC 8-6 NOTE

Exhibit 7-17I-T

Exhibit 7-17F-T

Exhibit 7-17E-T

Copyright © 2024 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.