PORTLAND, Ore. — A 21-year-old Somali-American arrested here in late 2010 after pushing a cellphone button to trigger what he believed was a huge car bomb, in fact an elaborate and inert F.B.I. decoy device, was convicted on Thursday in Federal District Court of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He faces up to life in prison.
The jury, deliberating for one day, rejected the claim by the defendant, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, that he had been entrapped and induced into a terrorist act by undercover F.B.I. agents posing as radical Islamic militants. His lawyers argued that the undercover operatives, having invested huge resources and time into the case, manipulated Mr. Mohamud into a plot he would never have undertaken on his own.
“We’re disappointed,” said Stephen R. Sady, Mr. Mohamud’s lead defense lawyer, who said the verdict would be appealed. “We obviously thought he was entrapped.”
Mr. Sady said he hoped Senior Judge Garr M. King, who set sentencing for May 14, would consider mitigating evidence that came out in the trial. Mr. Mohamud showed little obvious emotion as the verdict was read by Judge King, or as he was led from the courtroom, where the sound of shackles applied to his hands could be heard from the benches inside.
The case gripped Oregon and seized national attention in November 2010, partly through a glimpse of undercover antiterror policing, in the sting operation that ensnared Mr. Mohamud, but perhaps even more because of the setting — a downtown Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland’s premier open-space oasis, packed on the night of the attack with an estimated 25,000 people.
What had loomed large and global at the time with its hints of international terrorist intrigue, ultimately became, through the two weeks of testimony, a smaller, more intimate story of psychology. The jury, in assessing hours of secretly recorded conversations and evidence as well of what seemed a typical college student’s life at Oregon State University, was asked to decide whether the thin young man sitting with lawyers was a romantic hate-filled fantasist who just wanted to strike a pose, or a genuine jihadist nipped in the bud before violence could be done.
Whether Portland was ever actually threatened became part of the debate at the trial.
Undercover F.B.I. agents testifying for the prosecution said that they feared Mr. Mohamud could have connected with real terrorists and bombmakers had they not intervened with a sting operation. Mr. Mohamud’s lawyers, by contrast, argued to the jury that the case was all about the character of a callow, immature young man. They called witnesses, including friends and family members of the defendant who called him goofy and fun-loving, and a threat-assessment expert who said that the bellicose bluster about radical Islam — in written articles, journal entries and comments recorded by the F.B.I. — was adolescent chest-thumping and nothing more.
“This case is a tragedy,” Mr. Sady said in his summation to the jury on Wednesday, one day before the guilty verdict.
Portland residents interviewed on Thursday in the square where the attack was to have occurred mostly said they had paid little attention to a trial about what might have been.
“Guns are more of a concern to me,” said Dana Odling, a retired food service worker for the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. She said that especially since the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a shopping mall just outside Portland — both in December — she had been much more conscious of the potential mayhem that one person with a store-bought weapon could create. “Something like that can happen anytime, anywhere,” she said.
Matthew Brown, a property manager who lives near the square, said that after an arrest was made in the 2010 case, he considered the matter settled.
“So many things happening all over the world — if you start getting yourself weighed down with every little thing you’d be one depressed individual,” he said.
