ISIS Militant Quietly Released after FBI Intervention Surfaces in Minimum Security Jail

An ISIS operative jailed in Chicago and mysteriously released after FBI intervention, has surfaced in a minimum security prison about 165 miles south of the Windy City. His name is Emad Karakrah, the ringleader of a sophisticated narco-terror operation, and in 2014 he was arrested after leading police on a high-speed chase through Chicago streets with an ISIS flag waving from his car. When police finally captured Karakrah, he told officers his car was rigged with explosives that would detonate if searched. Bomb disposal units secured the vehicle without incident, but Karakrah’s arrest helped expose a huge narco-terrorist network with roots and financing in El Paso, Texas. Karakrah also lived in New Mexico, the border state where authorities just raided an extremist Muslim compound that trained kids to commit school shootings.

Judicial Watch uncovered Karakrah’s terrorism record and has reported extensively on his extremist activities, including a 2009 plot to bomb talk-show host Oprah Winfrey’s Chicago studios and the iconic Sears Tower. Judicial Watch also produced an investigative documentary about the narco-terrorist cell that Karakrah and other jihadists—including two of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists (Jaber A. Elbaneh and Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah)—operated from El Paso. Karakrah was a logistics and transportation operative for militant Islamists in the United States, according to high-level law enforcement sources. He moved people, weapons, explosives, drugs, money, and other materiel to terrorist cells operating in Chicago, Brooklyn, New York and Saddle Brook, New Jersey, among other locations across the U.S. More than a decade ago Karakrah smuggled drugs and weapons for the renowned Juárez drug cartel in Mexico.

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