A United States Soldier has admitted to helping the Islamic State in several of its operations with a drone.
The United States soldier based in Hawaii pleaded guilty on Wednesday as he revealed that he provided secret military information to agents of the terrorist organisation in form of a drone meant to track United States troops as well as other forms of support.
According to reports from the Associated Press, AP 35 year old Sergeant 1st Class Ikaika Kang, stood before a United States Magistrate court in handcuffs and prison uniform and pleaded guilty to all four counts leveled against him.
“Your honor, I provided unclassified, classified documents to the Islamic State,” the United States Soldier said, while also admitting that he also provided the drone.
The Prosecutor Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Sorenson revealed that the soldier had pleaded guilty to the charges when other supports he had provided to the terrorist group were uncovered.
According to Sorenson, Sgt. Knag had become sympathetic to the Islamic State by early 2016 adding that the FBI gathered information from sources he knew, worked with or lived with when it began an investigation in August 2016.
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Sgt. Kang had furnished the Islamic State with voluminous, digital documents that included sensitive information including the U.S. military’s weapons file, details about a sensitive mobile airspace management system as well as various military manuals and documents containing personal information about U.S. service members.
Kang had also provided documents including call signs, mission procedures and radio frequencies, “all of which would have been helpful to ISIS,” Sorenson said.
Sorenson further revealed that the United States soldier during one his meetings with supposed agents of the Islamic terror group had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Islamic State in both Arabic and English and had kissed an IS flag given to him by a supposed IS Sheikh.
Prosecutors told the court that after he had sworn his loyalty to the group, the United States soldier said he wanted to get his rifle and fight “just go to downtown Honolulu and Waikiki strip and start shooting,” he had said at the time. It was at this point that he was arrested by the FBI.
Kang’s defense attorney, Birney Bervar told reporters after the hearing that his client had clearly been enticed but it amounted to an uphill task for the prosecution to prove that his client was entrapped; the law of entrapment is quite difficult to prove he added.
In exchange for Kang’s guilty plea, prosecutors said they won’t charge him with additional crimes, including violations of the espionage act, other terrorism-related laws and federal firearms statutes.
A confidential informant had told FBI agents investigating the United States soldier that he was obsessed with videos depicting terrorism beheadings, suicide bombings and other violence, and he watched them in his bedroom for hours daily.
Knag had confided in the informant that he would attack Schofield Barracks a large army base near Honolulu in a suicide attack should he be successful in joining the terrorist group.
According to the informant, Knag watched videos of beheadings and decapitations for four to five hours each weekday and more on the weekends, the informant told agents in 2016.
“Kang began researching Islam in 2014, couldn’t wait to move to the Middle East to join the cause and was only in the military for a paycheck,” the informant revealed.
Sgt. Kang is expected to receive a 25 year prison sentence as part of a plea agreement when he is sentenced Dec. 10.