A West Philly man was sentenced to up to 40 months in prison for seeking to make bombs in support of a terror group

Chris Palmer, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jun 25, 2026

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PHILADELPHIA — A West Philadelphia man who was convicted last year of seeking to build bombs in support of Islamic extremist groups was sentenced Thursday to 20 to 40 months in prison and six years of probation.

Muhyyee-Ud-din Abdul-Rahman, 20, was found guilty in September of charges including attempting to possess weapons of mass destruction after jurors concluded he had experimented three years ago in and around his Wynnefield home with dangerous chemicals often found in high-volume explosives.

Authorities said that Abdul-Rahman had done so after he communicated with Syrian extremists on Instagram, and that their arrest of Abdul-Rahman in 2023 had prevented him from unleashing a terror attack on the region.

Jurors, however, found Abdul-Rahman not guilty of the more serious charge of possessing weapons of mass destruction, suggesting they believed he intended to build a bomb but had never succeeded. Common Pleas Court Judge Michele Hangley also threw out a conspiracy charge after ruling that prosecutors had not proved Abdul-Rahman had been working with anyone else.

Abdul-Rahman told Hangley after being convicted that he had matured during his time in custody, much of it spent in a juvenile facility because he was arrested as a teen. And he said he had come to reject the radical beliefs promoted by the group he was following, Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad, or KTJ.

Still, District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that he was “deeply concerned” by what he cast as an insufficient penalty for a would-be terrorist. Krasner said his office had asked that Abdul-Rahman serve at least 10 years behind bars because prosecutors believe he remains “an extreme danger” to the city.

“We ought to be able to live in a city where a terrorist is kept off the streets for a reasonable amount of time,” Krasner said.

Federal investigators looking into KTJ’s activities in the United States in 2023 found that Abdul-Rahman was the only person in the country exchanging messages with some of its key online propagandists. Further investigation later revealed that Abdul-Rahman, around that time, had also applied for his first passport, tried to reach out to a Syrian border-crossing office, and purchased or possessed wires and chemicals common in homemade bombs.

When authorities went on to conduct surveillance of Abdul-Rahman, officials said at trial, officers tailing him at a Lowe’s store saw him buy muriatic acid, a key component in a violent explosive dubbed TATP, also known as “the mother of Satan.” And a review of his internet search history around that time showed he had been looking up Philadelphia parade routes, trash can bombs, and nuclear power plants — something authorities said was consistent with “target and tactic” research.

When federal agents questioned Abdul-Rahman inside a police station, an official testified, he admitted conducting bomb tests near his house and said he wanted to become a “bomb guy” for KTJ in Syria.

Authorities arrested Abdul-Rahman in August 2023, just as he was to begin his senior year in high school. At the time, he was a promising wrestler with a college scholarship offer, and his father, Qawi Abdul-Rahman, is a well-known criminal defense lawyer who has mounted unsuccessful campaigns to become a city judge.

Abdul-Rahman’s attorneys said at trial that he had made mistakes, but that he was an impressionable teen who had fallen down a “rabbit hole” of online propaganda. They also said he had never succeeded in building a bomb and did not take serious, in-person steps to advance the radical views he expressed online or in his house.

At a hearing last month, one of his attorneys, Donald Chisholm, urged Hangley to consider that Abdul-Rahman’s path to the crime began when he was 16 years old.

“Even at the age he is now,” Chisholm said, “he’s not fully matured.”

Chisholm, said Thursday that he thought the sentence was fair, and that Krasner’s continued insistence on casting his client as dangerous was “disingenuous” and did not account for factors such as his client’s age at the time of arrest, or his growth over the last several years.

The case attracted attention in part because it was a rare example of the district attorney’s office seeking to convict someone it described as a would-be international terrorist. Although federal counterterrorism agents were heavily involved in the investigation, juveniles are rarely prosecuted in federal courts.

Krasner said Thursday that Abdul-Rahman likely would have faced a significantly harsher penalty if he had been convicted of similar conduct in the federal system, and he criticized the state’s sentencing guidelines, which prosecutors said Hangley cited when imposing her penalty.

Abdul-Rahman has already served about 34 months in custody, meaning he will face a maximum of another six months in prison under the penalty Hangley imposed.

Krasner said his office was weighing whether to appeal the sentence.

(Staff writer Jillian Kramer contributed to this article.)