Officials Claim Slain Boston ‘Terror Suspect’ Wanted to Behead Police

Little Evidence Presented for Allegation

Having killed 26-year-old Usama Rahim earlier this week at a bus stop in front of a Boston-area CVS, officials are now declaring him not only a “terror suspect,” but someone who was involved in an “ISIS-inspired plot” to behead police officers.

The evidence presented so far appears incredibly flimsy, in spite of FBI claims that they’d been trailing Rahim 24-hours a day for months on end, citing a Tuesday morning police call in which he claimed to have wanted to “go after them, those boys in blue.”

That’s not exactly the same thing as a beheading plot, but officials are looking to treat it as the same thing, claiming that he had a “machete,” which was later revised to a knife, and that he had mentioned beheading some unidentified person in a conversation with two other people.

With Rahim already dead and thus no court proceedings necessary, expect officials to continue to hype the “foiled plot” with impunity, knowing that they’ll never actually have to defend the allegations with more than just comments to media outlets.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.