Former Penn State Abington student pleaded guilty to lying about his ties to ISIS

A former student at Pennsylvania State University’s Abington campus pleaded guilty Friday to lying in federal documents about whether he’d ever communicated with ISIS sympathizers or other potential terrorists.

Kamal Fataliev, 20, a Russian citizen who was also a legal permanent U.S. resident, wrote in a 2023 application to become an American citizen that he had no ties to such groups, even though he’d been sharing information about weapons, guerrilla warfare, and toxins with extremists online since 2022, according to court testimony.

Fataliev, who has been incarcerated since last year, is expected to be deported following an upcoming sentencing hearing. He said little in court on Friday while appearing before U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III. Fataliev’s attorney, Jonathan McDonald, declined to comment afterward.

The U.S Attorney’s Office had originally charged Fataliev in 2023 with lying to the FBI about his participation in group chats involving ISIS sympathizers and at least one suspect in an averted terrorist attack in Chicago in 2022.

Prosecutors said in court documents that Fataliev, in the group chats, had uploaded hundreds of bomb, poison, and weapons-making manuals while working part-time and attending business classes at the university. He also expressed “radical Islamist views,” prosecutors said, including having a conversation about killing a French model who he believed had disrespected the Quran.

When federal agents confronted him about those messages, prosecutors said, he lied to them, and he was charged last summer with two counts of lying to the FBI.

But Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph LaBar said prosecutors were dropping those charges and instead allowing Fataliev to plead guilty solely to the crime of lying on his U.S. citizenship application last July. In it, said Bartle, the judge, Fataliev falsely asserted he’d had no association with ISIS or other terror groups.

Fataliev is tentatively scheduled to be sentenced in October. But Bartle said he would try to honor a request from both sides to resolve the matter before then so that Fataliev can be released from prison and into the custody of Immigrations and Custody Enforcement to be deported.