Mohamed Osman Mohamud: 5 Facts About the Portland Bomb Suspect

(Nov. 29) -- On Friday, the FBI arrested 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud for allegedly attempting to detonate a van filled with dummy explosives at a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, Ore. With Mohamud due in court today, many are wondering: Who is this alleged would-be terrorist?

Here a few details about his life that have been emerging over the past few days:

He was born in Somalia: Mohamud was born in Mogadishu in 1991. According to Politics Daily, his parents fled the war-torn country marred by famine and violence for a large Somali community in Portland while he was in elementary school. They became well respected members of their new community.

He seemed like a regular American kid: An engineering student at Oregon State, Mohamud got good grades, played basketball, followed the Portland Trail Blazers and enjoyed the night life.

But there were signs: For one science fair, Mohamud chose a subject that could have appealed to any kid who watched movies or played video games, but in retrospect it seems more insidious: He wanted to study how a rocket-propelled grenade worked.

But beneath the normal facade, it appears Mohamud was filling up with hate. In an affidavit, he said he had been considering violent jihad since he was 15.

"The main thing was, the way he said he hated Americans," classmate Andy Stull told KGW News in Portland. "It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life -- 'I hate Americans!'"

He had stopped attending mosque: In the monthslong period of erratic behavior before his arrest, Mohamud stopped attending the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center (recently the target of an arson attack), where he sometimes prayed. Some suspect that he was becoming radicalized by what he was reading on the Internet, rather than at the mosque.

Sources close to him said he was behaving strangely in other ways as well.

"He seemed to be in a state of confusion," the imam at his mosque told The New York Times. "He would say things that weren't true. 'I'm going to go get married,' for example. But he wasn't getting married."

He may not really have been a mastermind: Media and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have been hailing the FBI's success in catching Mohamud as a great victory in the war on terror. But Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com isn't convinced. He suspects the FBI may have entrapped Mohamud, meaning they induced him into choosing an act of violence when he wouldn't have done so otherwise. A key conversation between Mohamud and an undercover agent, in which he said he wanted to be "operational" and explode a bomb, was not recorded due to technical difficulties.