By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — A Pennsylvania woman who called herself JihadJane was tied Tuesday to an alleged assassination plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the prophet Muhammad atop the body of a dog.
In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors accused Colleen R. LaRose, an American from the Philadelphia suburbs, of linking up through the Internet with militants overseas and plotting to carry out a murder.
Ms. LaRose, 46, was arrested in Philadelphia in October, but her case was kept under seal. Although the indictment does not identify the target, a law enforcement official said her case was linked to the arrests Tuesday of seven Muslims in Ireland in connection with a scheme to kill the cartoonist, Lars Vilks. A group linked to Al Qaeda had put a $100,000 bounty on his head for the cartoon, which the group perceived as an insult to Islam.
European news reports said Irish police, who arrested the four men and three women, had coordinated the operation with the United States.
A police statement issued Wednesday in Dublin said the Irish arrests followed a joint investigation by police in Ireland, the United States and “a number of European countries,” and that the suspects were being held at four police stations in an area about 100 miles south of Dublin, under a law that allowed for them to be held for up to seven days for questioning.
News reports in Ireland said that the seven being held were from Algeria, Croatia, the Palestinian territories, Libya and the United States, and were aged between their mid-20’s and late 40’s. The Irish Times reported that American investigators believe that the leader of the group was an Algerian who has been living in Ireland for the past 10 years.
A Justice Department spokesman would not confirm whether Ms. LaRose had been involved with the plot.
Mark T. Wilson and Rossman D. Thompson, federal public defenders in Philadelphia who are representing Ms. LaRose, declined to comment.
Michael L. Levy, the United States attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, said in a statement the case illustrated how terrorists were looking for American recruits who could blend in. “It shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance,” he said.
Ms. LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The official said Ms. LaRose was born in Michigan and later lived in Texas and Montgomery County, Pa.
The indictment said that in mid-2008, Ms. LaRose, using the aliases JihadJane and Fatima LaRose, began posting on YouTube and other Internet sites messages about her desire to help Muslims. A MySpace profile for a woman who refers to herself as JihadJane displays pictures of bloodshed and violence in the Middle East scrawled with messages like “Palestine We Are With You” and “Sympathize With Gaza.”
By early 2009, the court papers said, she was exchanging e-mail messages with unidentified co-conspirators in Southeast Asia and Europe and expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.
The indictment refers to e-mail messages in which a conspirator, citing how Ms. LaRose’s appearance and American passport would make it easier for her to operate undetected, allegedly directed her in March 2009 to go to Sweden to help carry out a murder. She agreed to do so, writing, “I will make this my goal till I achieve it or die trying,” the indictment says. She and another unnamed American later posted online solicitations for money for that project, the document said.
Ms. LaRose had attracted the government’s attention by then. She was questioned by F.B.I. agents on July 17, 2009, and falsely told them that she had never solicited money online for terrorism, had never used the alias JihadJane and had never made postings on a terrorist Web site, the court papers say.
Despite drawing the F.B.I.’s attention, the indictment says Ms. LaRose traveled to Europe in August, joined an online community hosted by the intended Swedish victim in September and performed online searches to track him. She apparently never attempted to carry out the killing.
The indictment also says Ms. LaRose recruited other people on the Internet to wage or support jihadist attacks.
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Vilks, the cartoonist who was the target of the alleged murder plot, said that he learned of the American and Irish investigations from reporters, who tied up his telephone line. Unable to get through by phone, the police who were trying to contact him to send a patrol car to his home in rural Sweden, he told the paper.
Mr. Vilks said he had grown concerned early this year when someone using a Somali mobile phone began calling him. But he said his home’s remote location gave him some protection.
Mr. Vilks defended his drawing, saying that it was not meant as an attack on Muhammad but rather as a satire.
“But people have no sense of humor,” he was quoted as saying.
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