Man pleads guilty in recruit center bomb plot - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Man pleads guilty in recruit center bomb plot

BALTIMORE — A Maryland man pleaded guilty Thursday to trying to detonate what he thought was a car bomb outside a military recruiting center in suburban Baltimore.

Antonio Martinez originally pleaded not guilty but entered a new plea in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to a charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against a property leased and used by the U.S. Department of Defense. The plea agreement calls for a 25-year prison sentence. Martinez is scheduled to be sentenced April 6.

Court documents detail a sting that allegedly caught Martinez trying to detonate a phony car bomb, provided by the FBI, outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Catonsville.

The 22-year-old's attorneys sought to have the charges dismissed, arguing that early meetings with an informant were not recorded. They said not having those recordings deprived Martinez of potentially exculpatory evidence.

The FBI's informant first communicated with Martinez on Facebook after seeing public posts "espousing his extremist views" and recognizing him from a mosque he attended, according to court documents. Martinez later told the informant of his ideas for attacking military-linked sites and said all he thought about was jihad, documents state.

The FBI informant and the undercover agent who communicated with Martinez gave him repeated opportunities to back out of his plan to bomb the recruitment center, documents show. But he insisted he was committed to the plot, even after expressing reservations in the wake of the arrest of a Somali-born teenager in Oregon in a similar sting.