Salman Al-Farisi Center (AP)
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Oregon’s teenage Christmas-tree bomber wannabe was his immigrant mom’s golden boy until his terrorist fervor took hold and was possibly intensified by anger over his parents’ divorce, friends said yesterday.
Suspected Somali-born fiend Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was “a good kid who made good grades” but may have been shaken by the summer 2009 breakup of his parents, Mariam and Osman Barre, said neighbor Stephanie Napier.
“[Mariam Barre] always talked so good about him,” Napier told The Oregonian newspaper.
But “with his folks splitting up, who knows?” added the neighbor’s husband, Adam.
Mohamud is to be arraigned today in federal court on charges that he plotted — but never got the chance — to detonate what was actually a bogus car bomb at a crowded Portland tree-lighting ceremony Friday.
One former high-school friend said he vividly remembered Mohamud’s weird pick for a physics project: how a rocket-propelled grenade worked.
Mohamud was born in Somalia in 1991 but moved with his parents at age 5 from the war-torn streets of Mogadishu — where boys were recruited as child soldiers — to the Portland suburbs. He graduated from Westview HS in 2009 and immediately enrolled at Oregon State University to take engineering classes.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been called in to help police in Corvallis, Ore., investigate an arson fire early yesterday morning at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center, which Mohamud attended.
No one was injured in the fire — which officials said was set intentionally and was confined to one room.