SOMALI REFUGEE ON THE RUN AFTER 'MURDER ATTEMPT' IN U.S.
SOMALI REFUGEE ON THE RUN AFTER 'MURDER ATTEMPT' IN U.S.
Attorney fretted over fair jury after Trump executive order
Updated: 03/02/2017 at 8:24 PM
LEO HOHMANN
A Somali man who came to America as a child refugee has jumped bail and remains at large after being charged with attempted murder in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Abdirhman Ahmad Noor, 24, is charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault for allegedly shooting at two men on July 8 in or near the parking lot of the Foxridge Apartments in Aberdeen. Noor was said to have chased the two men down, firing at them. One man, Dar’na Tansmore, was hit and laid wounded on the ground when Noor allegedly walked up, stood over his victim and shot him again.
Tansmore was taken to a hospital in Sioux Falls and survived. Police have not given a motive for the shooting.
About half of the residents at the Foxridge Apartments are Somalis, according to Aberdeen residents. The July shooting was followed by another incident involving a drive-by shooting in early September in which no arrests have been made. On Aug. 14, another incident took place just south of the apartments when a man identified as Ehkhu Poe allegedly charged a police officer with a knife and was shot twice but survived to face charges.
Some residents told the local paper they want to move, while others said they live in fear and keep their doors locked all the time.
Noor was scheduled to appear in circuit court in Aberdeen Tuesday for a pre-trial hearing, but he failed to appear. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest.
Just before 6 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, the Brown County Jail confirmed to WND that Noor was still not incarcerated there.
His attorneys had also filed a motion to suppress information Noor gave to local police, arguing that English was his second language, according to court documents.
Lutheran Social Services South Dakota has been paid by the federal government to resettle 947 Somali refugees in South Dakota since 2002. Most are sent to the cities of Sioux Falls and Huron, but some make secondary migration to Aberdeen to work in the meatpacking and molded fiberglass plants there.
The FBI has confirmed that more than 40 Somali refugees in Minnesota have left the state to join foreign terrorist organizations including al-Shabab in Somalia and ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
More than 132,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in more than 200 U.S. cities and towns since civil war broke out in Somalia in 1991. Somali refugees have recently been implicated in terrorist knife attacks on the campus of Ohio State University on Nov. 28 and at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Sept. 17 last year. Eleven were wounded at Ohio State and 10 were wounded in the St. Cloud attack.
Noor has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Judge Jon Flemmer set Noor’s bond at $50,000 cash, after the state’s attorney requested it be set at $400,000. Noor was incarcerated for nearly three months, from July 8 to Oct. 11, at which time his family came up with the $50,000 cash bond and he was freed pending trial on March 15.
But that’s unlikely to happen now since no one can find Noor, who became a U.S. citizen about eight years ago, county officials told WND.
Aberdeen’s local newspaper, the American New, made no mention in its story Wednesday of Noor’s status as a Somali refugee. The same paper did not cover the trial of another Somali refugee, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, who was convicted in December of attempted sexual assault against a mentally incapacitated woman at a group home in Aberdeen. After WND reported on the conviction, the American News did publish an article but buried it on Page 3 and did not mention that the sex crime was committed by a Somali refugee.
Worried about Trump’s executive order
In a pretrial motion filed Feb. 10, Noor’s attorney, William Gerdes, expressed concerns about getting a fair trial for his client in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order listing Somalia as one of seven terror-prone Muslim countries that needed a temporary travel ban until better vetting systems could be developed
.
Gerdes asked the court for permission to privately ask certain questions of the jury pool to query their opinions related to Trump’s action.
“Defendant was born in Somalia,” Gerdes writes in the motion for supplemental confidential juror questionnaire. “On January 27, 2017, the President of the United States of America issued an Executive Order, which proclaims that ‘the immigrant and non-immigrant entry into the United States of aliens from [Somalia] would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.’ Our President, has temporarily suspended the entry into the United States by Somalians.”
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2017/03/mot...berdeen-sd.jpg
http://www.wnd.com/files/2017/03/mot...berdeen-sd.jpg
Meanwhile, some in South Dakota are growing weary of the increasing refugee presence and resulting crimes.
State Sen. Neal Tapio, the former state director for Trump’s campaign in South Dakota, introduced a resolution in the State Senate that cleared out of committee Wednesday after an hours-long hearing in which tearful refugees testified about their lives in the state. The resolution calls on the state to give a vote of “no confidence” to the refugee resettlement program until President Donald Trump has a chance to implement extreme vetting.
James Simpson, author of the “Red-Green Axis” and an expert on the refugee resettlement industry, noted that in the wake of Trump’s executive order, media pundits and refugee advocates repeated the mantra that no refugee from any of the seven countries has killed anyone.
“Refugee advocates constantly claim that no refugee has killed anyone. But that is a calculated misdirection,” Simpson wrote in a recent op-ed for the Daily Caller. “There have been plenty who have tried. Since 9-11, there have been 580 terror plots in the U.S. and at least 380 were foreign-born and at least 40 were refugees.”
A report by Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies revealed that 72 immigrants from the seven countries on Trump’s list have been convicted of terror-related crimes since 9/11.
And that doesn’t even include the non-terrorist violent crimes.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/somali-re...BH4MGxgjmp0.99
