A federal judge in London, Kentucky, sentenced Mufid Elfgeeh to an additional 230 months in prison Tuesday for the attempted murder of his cellmate inside United States Penitentiary McCreary, a violent 2019 attack that saw the inmate stab his cellmate at least 30 times with an improvised weapon. Elfgeeh, already one of the highest-profile terrorism convicts in the federal system, was serving a 270-month sentence at the high-security Pine Knot facility for attempting to recruit fighters and provide material support to ISIS when the assault took place.
U.S. District Judge Robert Wier imposed the sentence on September 1, 2026, following Elfgeeh's conviction, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky. A federal jury in London had convicted him of attempted murder on April 29, 2026, following a two-day trial, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That means seven years passed between the stabbing itself and the verdict that finally held him accountable for it.
FBI Louisville flagged the case update in a post on X, noting that McCreary staff had observed Elfgeeh stabbing his cellmate while he was serving his terrorism sentence, according to a post from FBI Louisville
. Federal prosecutors say the motive behind the attack was mundane and petty measured against its violence: Elfgeeh was angry that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had denied his request for a private cell, per the same Justice Department account.
A Chaotic Scene Inside the Cell
The attack itself required an extraordinary tactical response from correctional staff. Officers tried to halt Elfgeeh using a barrage of non-lethal crowd-control measures — three separate applications of pepper spray, OC vapor grenades, foam baton strikes, pepper balls, and hornet nest munitions — before staff in protective gear finally breached the cell to disarm him, the U.S. Attorney's Office detailed in its release. The scale of that response underscores just how violent and prolonged the struggle inside the cell became before it was brought under control.
The stabbing happened in 2019, while Elfgeeh was housed at McCreary serving his original terrorism sentence, according to local reporting citing the U.S. Attorney's Office. USP McCreary is a high-security federal facility in Pine Knot, Kentucky, housing roughly 1,350 male inmates in its main penitentiary, per the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The facility has faced scrutiny before over safety and staffing; the American Federation of Government Employees pointed to a November 2018 inmate brawl at the prison that hospitalized five correctional officers as evidence of chronic understaffing problems there.
An Early Face of Domestic ISIS Recruitment
Elfgeeh's original case made him a notable figure in the early years of America's homegrown ISIS threat. He was arrested in Rochester, New York, in May 2014, and federal law enforcement identified him at the time as one of the first American citizens apprehended for recruiting on behalf of ISIS, according to Al Jazeera. In March 2016, a federal court in Rochester sentenced him to 270 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to attempting to recruit fighters and provide material support to ISIS, according to the FBI.
That earlier conviction placed Elfgeeh among the earliest domestic test cases for how the U.S. justice system would handle ISIS-linked recruitment prosecutions on American soil. Now, more than a decade after his arrest and seven years after the McCreary stabbing, he faces a substantially longer combined prison term stemming from an attack that began, prosecutors say, over nothing more than a housing dispute.
