INDIANA
After admitting to trying to provide material support or resources, specifically firearms, to a designated foreign terrorist organization, 25-year-old Moyad Dannon of Fishers, Indiana, was sentenced to 16 years and eight months in federal prison.
Dannon will also be subject to a lifetime of surveillance.
After pleading guilty to the exact charges in October 2021, his brother, Mahde Dannon, received a 20-year jail term.
“The defendants in this case fused two grave threats to Americans’ security by attempting to support a brutal terrorist organization through the illicit manufacture of ghost guns,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco.
(News Report Four Years Ago)
“The defendant showed an absolute disregard for the rule of law and is being held accountable for his actions,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. “Working with his brother, the defendant produced large caches of privately made firearms and attempted to place them in the hands of ISIS members overseas to be used against U.S. service members and allies.”
The Dannon brothers planned to sell stolen weapons to an ex-con who was helping the FBI in June of 2018, according to court documents.
The Dannon brothers sold the collaborating person many weapons that they had gotten illegally between July and December of 2018.
At about the same time, the Dannon brothers started making “ghost guns”—essentially fully functional.223 caliber semi-automatic rifles that they sold to an undercover agent from the FBI.
They would buy the components online and put them together.
The Dannon brothers manufactured untraceable, completely automated weapons in late 2018, selling 223 caliber weapons to the undercover agent and confidential informant (CI) using a procedure similar to that used to make semi-automatic rifles.
Near the U.S. southwest border, Moyad Dannon went undercover with the agent to try to sell that firearm and other fully automatic rifles to someone who was working with the FBI.
While on that journey, Moyad Dannon found out that the prospective buyer wanted to send the guns to a Middle Eastern country where ISIS would use them. According to Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, ISIS is a federally classified foreign terrorist organization.
The Dannon brothers, who were aware that the weapons would end up in the hands of ISIS and its followers in the Middle East, consented to produce and sell 55 more fully automatic “ghost guns” to a customer based on the U.S. southwestern border.
Using components they bought online, the Dannon brothers assembled five fully automatic two hundred twenty-three caliber rifles on May 15, 2019.
Those five automatic firearms were going to be sent abroad to ISIS, and the Dannon brothers knew it at the time, court evidence indicated.
The Dannon brothers manufactured five fully automatic rifles and then sold them to undercover FBI agents operating near the southwest border, pretending to be the buyer’s workers.
The FBI wasted no time in apprehending the Dannon brothers.
Moyad Dannon, who was supposed to be an ISIS member fighting in Syria between February and May of 2019, had several significant interactions with an undercover agent.
Talking about his plans to go from Indiana to Syria, Moyad said he wanted to get to regions controlled by ISIS. He wanted to help ISIS fight against the US and the Syrian government by using his talents and knowledge of guns.
After Moyad was taken into custody, the FBI searched his keychain and found a flash drive with around 16 GB of ISIS propaganda.
The disk had brutal movies showing beheadings, hostage situations, and U.S. military members being killed by ISIS snipers, among other gruesome scenes.
On a laptop, researchers found identical propaganda movies from ISIS.
The FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Fishers, Indiana, Police Department investigated the case.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew Rinka, Kate Olivier, and Kelly Rota for the Southern District of Indiana, Deputy Chief Paul Casey, and Trial Attorney Kevin Nunnally of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section prosecuted this case.