According to an FBI affidavit, agents were tipped off in September that Hamzeh planned to travel to Israel in October to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank. He abandoned those plans due to “family, financial and logistic reasons,” the affidavit said, but refocused his efforts on a domestic attack.
Hamzeh discussed his plans extensively with two FBI informants. The affidavit said the FBI started recording his conversations with the informants in October.
Hamzeh and the two informants traveled to a gun range on Jan. 19 and practiced with a pistol. Afterward they took a tour of a Masonic temple in Milwaukee. The affidavit does not name the temple. Dean Puschnig, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Greg Haanstad, declined to identify it.
“I am telling you, if this hit is executed, it will be known all over the world ... all the Mujahedeen will be talking and they will be proud of us,” Hamzeh said, according to the affidavit. “Such operations will increase in America, when they hear about it. The people will be scared and the operations will increase. ... This way we will be igniting it. I mean we are marching at the front of the war.”
“We are here defending Islam, young people together join to defend Islam, that’s it, that is what our intention is,” he said.
According to the affidavit, Hamzeh met with two undercover FBI agents on Monday. They presented him with two automatic machine guns and a silencer. He paid for the weapons and silencer in cash and put them in the trunk of his car. The agents then arrested him and recovered the guns and silencer.
Hamzeh’s arrest marks the Milwaukee area’s second brush with a mass shooting in less than four years. A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page fatally shot six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Cre
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