Islamism-linked US beheading suspect to be charged

A US worker suspected of beheading a colleague after trying to convert his co-workers to Islam is to be formally charged on Tuesday, a police spokesman said.

Alton Nolen, 30, is expected to be charged with first-degree murder, as well as assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He may also face federal indictments, but not terrorism charges, according to media reports.

His mother broke her silence at the weekend, after the alleged incident on September 25, apologizing in a video posted online.

It was after being fired from his job at the Vaughan Foods in an Oklahoma City suburb that Nolen went on a frenzied knife rampage, severing the head of a woman colleague and wounding another before being shot by his former boss.

“My heart is just so heavy right now,” his mother Joyce Nolen said in the video posted Saturday on Facebook. “That’s not my son.”

The incident came in the wake of a series of beheadings of Western captives by militant fighters in the Middle East and Algeria, but US officials have not confirmed any link to the Oklahoma case. Nolen had recently converted to Islam.

“His family, our hearts bleed right now because what they saying Alton has done,” Nolen’s mother said in the short video statement, sitting next to her daughter Megan.

“I want to apologize to both families — because this is not Alton.”

She said she was hoping that justice will prevail and “the whole story will come out.”

Troubling online postings

On Facebook, Nolen went by the moniker Jah’Keem Yisrael. He posted photographs of the World Trade Center towers going up in smoke during the September 11, 2001 attacks and of graves.

“THE ONES WHO DIED IN SIN WILL REMAIN IN THEIR GRAVES CAUSE THEIR ALREADY IN HELL!!!” he wrote on September 17 in a posting that got five “likes”.

The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City has stressed that “this unwarranted act does not represent Islam in any shape or form.”

“We condemn, and are 100% against, the heartless & unnecessary act committed by the suspect. We stand for justice.”

Officials had said Nolen would be charged on Monday. But Moore city police department spokesman Jeremy Lewis told AFP the district attorney plans to present charges on Tuesday.

He said Nolen had been extremely cooperative with detectives. “He has confessed to a lot of this, which we will have in our probable cause affidavit,” the spokesman told CNN.

Texas governor Rick Perry, tipped by some to run for Republican US presidential nominee in 2016, weighed in on the case Monday, suggesting that Nolen should face terrorism charges.

“At some point in time, I think the (Obama) administration does have to address this as what it appears to many people that it is: an act of violence that is associated with terrorism,” he said.

In a separate case, a Kenyan man is being held on terror charges in nearby Oklahoma City for allegedly threatening to behead a woman days before last week’s decapitation in Moore.

Jacob Muriithi allegedly made the threat and mentioned the Islamic State group to a woman working at a nursing home in Oklahoma City, though the woman initially thought he was joking.