Political blogger Pamela Geller, American Freedom Defense Initiative's Houston-based founder, speaks during an interview in New York May 28, 2015.
Reuters/Brendan McDermid
<span id="articleText"><span id="midArticle_start"/> The organizer of a May event in Texas highlighting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed said on Thursday that she was the target of a man who federal prosecutors said had intended to behead police officers in Boston.
<span id="midArticle_0"/>However, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said it did not seem that Usamaah Abdullah Rahim had developed a specific plan to attack Pamela Geller.
<span id="midArticle_1"/>"This was wishful thinking" on Rahim's part, Evans said on NBC's "Today" program, although he noted Geller's name had come up in wiretapped phone calls.
<span id="midArticle_2"/>Geller had told CNN that she believed that Rahim, whom police said they shot dead on Tuesday after he allegedly confronted them with a large knife, had planned to come after her.
<span id="midArticle_3"/>Many Muslims consider cartoons of Mohammed blasphemous, and a series of violent confrontations have played out over the past year in the United States and Europe over the images. Gunmen had targeted Geller's event.
<span id="midArticle_4"/> <span class="first-article-divide"/>"Drawing a cartoon warrants chopping my head off? I don't understand it," Geller, president of a group that calls itself the American Freedom Defense Initiative, said on CNN. "What happened to give me liberty or give me death?"
<span id="midArticle_5"/>Her group is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's annual list of U.S. hate groups.
<span id="midArticle_6"/>Rahim had planned to travel out of Massachusetts to kill someone but on Tuesday changed his mind and told a friend that he instead would attempt to behead police officers in Boston, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit filed on Wednesday when the friend, David Wright, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
<span id="midArticle_7"/> <span class="second-article-divide"/>Rahim met with a third, as-yet-unidentified person, in Rhode Island to discuss the plot, according to the affidavit.
<span id="midArticle_8"/>Rahim had been under 24-hour surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force when police and FBI agents approached him on Tuesday morning for questioning. According to police, he advanced on the officers with a large knife and ignored orders to drop the weapon before he was shot and killed.
<span id="midArticle_9"/> <span class="third-article-divide"/>The AFDI event in Garland, Texas, was attacked by a pair of gunmen carrying assault rifles who were shot dead by police before they succeeded in killing anyone.
<span id="midArticle_10"/>Several hundred people, some armed, loudly denounced Islam outside a mosque in Phoenix on Friday. Police officers with gas masks and riot helmets were called in to separate them from pro-Muslim demonstrators.
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<span id="midArticle_12"/> (Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
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