AG Bondi says alleged serial rapist struck because Minnesota is ‘soft on crime’

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi is taking a “soft-on-crime” shot at Minnesota while her prosecutors are accusing a Minneapolis man of being a serial rapist whose attacks have spanned the past eight years.

Abdimahat Bille Mohamed, 28, was charged Thursday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul in connection with two of the assaults, one in 2017 and the other in September of this year, and the criminal complaint describes five rapes in all.

Mohamed was arrested on Nov. 26 and remains jailed in lieu of $300,000 bail ahead of a Dec. 31 hearing stemming from charges filed in Hennepin County District Court involving the most recent assault, on Sept. 15. The Minnesota Star Tribune has reached out to Brooke Adams, Mohamed’s attorney for those allegations, for a response.

Senior members of the U.S. Justice Department are highlighting the allegations against Mohamed as proof that Minnesota goes easy on criminals. Mohamed was spared prison in a plea agreement reached in Hennepin County covering the two assaults charged in the federal complaint. Instead, he was put on five years’ probation in May, about five months before he allegedly committed his most recent rape.

The federal charges come in the midst of President Donald Trump calling Minnesota’s Somali community “garbage” and reports of an increased federal immigration enforcement presence in the Twin Cities that is targeting the Somali population.

“This Somali national in Minnesota is charged with raping a minor and multiple adult women before being detained — only to be quickly released by a local court — after which he committed yet another rape,“ read a statement issued late Thursday afternoon from Bondi. ”This horrific case illustrates how left-wing soft-on-crime policies and vetting failures put innocent people at dire risk.”

In his own statement, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche added that the assaults, as spelled out in the charges, “are sickening ... and they happened in a state that has chosen ideology over public safety.”

Attorneys on both sides of the plea deal rejected the notion that Mohamed avoided prison because Minnesota’s judicial system is too willing to give violent criminals a pass.

The Justice Department comments are “a clear attempt to politicize a sexual assault prosecution to inflict further harm on our entire Somali community,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement. “Those who actually prosecute sexual assault cases every day know there are significant evidentiary hurdles to obtaining a prison sentence.”

Moriarty pointed out that her office “overcame the loss of critical witnesses to secure felony convictions against Mr. Mohamed earlier this year. Because our case was substantially weakened, we could not get the prison sentence we wanted.”

Thomas Beito, Mohamed’s attorney who negotiated the earlier plea agreement, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that “the prosecution did not give us anything out of the goodness of their hearts.” He said there were “serious problems with the credibility of the [teenage] victim.”

In the second case under the plea deal, he said, “we had a great consent defense. … We turned up a video of the act itself showing that this was consensual. That’s why [prosecutors] gave him what they did.”

Mohamed’s assaults began on Dec. 12, 2017, when he and two others kidnapped and raped a 15-year-old girl he met over SnapChat. He offered to pick her up in St. Paul and give her a ride, but instead, he drove the girl against her will to Minneapolis, where he parked and two men got in the car. One of them put a gun to the girl’s head and ordered her to perform a sex act on one of the other men. Mohamed then sexually assaulted the girl, at times at gunpoint. They let her go, and she called police.

On Feb. 7, 2018, a rideshare driver called Roseville police and said he had a woman in his car who had been sexually assaulted by three men. The woman told police that a man she knew from Instagram picked her up in his car. He and two other men held her against her will in the car and raped her before letting her go.

On May 8, 2018, a woman met Mohamed over SnapChat. He drove her to her home in St. Paul, but then locked the doors and drove to a Minneapolis alley and raped her. Another man got in the back seat and ordered her at gunpoint to perform a sex act on him. They pushed her out of the car and drove off.

On May 30, 2024, Mohamed picked up a woman he connected with through SnapChat along with her sister and drove them to his apartment, where he raped the woman in a bedroom. The sister, elsewhere in the apartment, heard screams and walked in during the assault.

The sister called police, who arrived to find Mohamed and the woman still in the apartment. Mohamed was soon arrested and was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct and related counts.

On Sept. 15, Mohamed picked up a woman in Mankato, ostensibly to take her for food then take her home. Instead, he drove her to a Bloomington hotel, where he held her captive for nearly a week and raped her.

The woman texted her sister that “I think I’m getting kidnapped” and that she needed help before Mohamed took away her phone away. On Sept. 21, the woman jumped out of Mohamed’s car and told a man, “Can you help me? I am being kidnapped.”