On Thursday, a grand jury indicted 23-year-old Alexander Ciccolo – also known as Ali al Amriki, “Amriki” being the surname the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) usually gives to American recruits – on a host of new charges related to his alleged support for the Islamic State.
Ciccolo’s father, Boston police captain Robert Ciccolo, contacted the FBI in 2014 over his son’s expressed wishes to fight for the Islamic State, launching a surveillance operation that ended up producing a long list of terrorism-related charges.
The elder Ciccolo has been criticized from some quarters for not treating his son as mentally ill and renewing the psychological care that had lapsed in his late teens, instead going to the FBI.
The indictments against Alexander Ciccolo make it clear just how dangerous he was. He stocked his apartment with Molotov cocktails, and was working on a pressure-cooker bomb similar to those used by the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing. He told an FBI informant that he planned to detonate his bomb in a crowded college cafeteria. He also spoke of carrying out bomb attacks against two bars and a police station.