Sinh Vinh Ngo Nguyen, who lived in Garden Grove, California, has just plead guilty to federal terrorism charges.

Nguyen, who had previously spent several months in Syria fighting against Bashar al-Assad, had reportedly been turned down by Al Qaeda previously. But after returning to the United States he met a few times with an Al Qaeda recruiter he had met on Facebook. On October 11 he was arrested and it turned out the recruiter he’d met was actually an undercover FBI agent.

During the trial Nguyen plead guilty to the charges placed against him, though Judge John F. Walter, who presided over the case did question how effective Nguyen would be to Al Qaeda, “I don’t see evidence that this defendant had any particular skill in firearms,” he said, “or that he had the ability to procure or deliver weapons.”

Still, that’s not to say that Nguyen would never have become effective if had eventually had proper training.

[via The Verge, The Daily Dot, NY Daily News]