Minneapolis man may have carried out suicide bombing

FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed Monday that a Minneapolis man may have been the first U.S. citizen to carry out a terrorist suicide bombing overseas.

Mueller told the independent Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., that the attack happened last October in northern Somalia, but that the suicide bomber, Shirwa Ahmed, apparently was, in his words, "radicalized" in Minnesota.

He said the notion of young American men going back to Somalia to kill themselves and possibly others is in his words, "a perversion of the immigrant story. And it raises the question of whether these young men will one day come home and, if so, what they might undertake here."

The FBI has acknowledged it helped return the remains of a Minneapolis man last fall to his family.

In the Twin Cities, a handful of young men of Somali descent have disappeared since last August. Family members are worried that their sons and nephews have gone back to Africa to fight.

The leaders of a Minneapolis mosque deny any connection between the mosque and the disappearances.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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