A Florida man was sentenced on Thursday to 20 years in federal prison and 15 years of supervised release after pleading guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS through an instructional bomb-making video.
The Justice Department said in a press release, citing court documents, that Romeo Xavier Langhorne pledged his allegiance to the Islamic terrorist organization in 2014 and engaged in online activity supportive of the group — including posting support on social media, participating in ISIS chat rooms and sharing ISIS-produced videos on YouTube — in 2018 and 2019.
Beginning in 2019, Langhorne began communicating with an undercover FBI agent posing as an ISIS affiliate about creating a video teaching viewers how to make an explosive known as triacetone triperoxide (TATP), telling the agent that he was making the video to arm ISIS adherents and others to use in support of the group, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI made the video based on Langhorne’s instructions, but unknown to him included only an inert chemical formula for TATP that would not cause an explosion. Langhorne then uploaded it to a video-sharing platform, according to the department.
Langhorne also asked the agent in 2019 to work with him to create a recording of an ISIS member saying “Allah Akbar” and of children saying “kill them all” in order, he said, “to encourage justified retaliation” against the U.S. over its role in killing Muslims, according to the Justice Department.
Langhorne was arrested in Nov. 2019.
The department’s release says that Langhorne admitted after his arrest that he had “probably at some point” pledged allegiance to former ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as well as ISIS as an organization and that he had communicated with the FBI agent and uploaded the video. He pled guilty to one count of attempting to provide material support to ISIS in May 2021.