A planned suicide bombing at Wichita’s Mid-Continent Airport was foiled by federal officials Friday when they arrested Terry Lee Loewen for seeking to commit “violent jihad against the United States.” Loewen was an avionics technician at the airport who tried to detonate a car full of what he thought were explosives.

Loewen was inspired to bomb the airport after studying the writings of the late al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamist cleric that also inspired Nidal Hasan to murder his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, as well as the failed Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber.” Al-Awlaki was introduced to his virgins by a U.S. predator drone in Yemen in 2011.

As for Loewen, he wrote to an undercover FBI agent, “Brothers like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are a great inspiration to me, but I must be willing to give up everything (like they did) to truly feel like a obedient slave of Allah.” He was not associated with any organized religion in Wichita, though he claims to be Muslim. According to FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Kaste, “Lone wolves – homegrown violent extremists – remain a very serious threat to our nation’s security.” Of course, Loewen is only “homegrown” in the sense that he was born here. All his inspiration came from radical Islamists abroad.