A Minnesota man charged with helping to orchestrate the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme was taken into custody Thursday in Mogadishu, Somalia, after four years as a fugitive, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced.
Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh, 42, of Burnsville, Minnesota, was taken into custody June 25 in a daytime raid coordinated by the FBI and Somali intelligence agencies, according to a news release from Rosen’s office. Eidleh was indicted in September 2022 as part of what prosecutors described as a massive scheme to defraud a federal child nutrition program.
Court documents do not show whether Eidleh has obtained an attorney, and he has not yet had an opportunity to enter a plea in the case.
According to prosecutors, Eidleh was an employee of Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit organization that claimed to provide millions of meals to children in need during the COVID-19 pandemic under a federal child nutrition program. Authorities said only a small portion of the federal money actually went toward feeding children. The rest, they alleged, was laundered through shell companies and spent on property, luxury cars, and travel.
Eidleh is one of dozens of defendants indicted in connection with the scheme. MSI previously reported that the scheme’s founder, Aimee Bock, was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison in May in the same case.
The arrest in Mogadishu expands the international dimension of the investigation. The FBI’s coordination with Somali intelligence to capture Eidleh four years after his indictment reflects the bureau’s sustained pursuit of suspects who flee the United States.
Eidleh’s case adds to a broader pattern of federal fraud enforcement involving Minnesota programs serving children, an issue that has drawn increasing attention from federal officials over the past year as scrutiny has focused on the Somali community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.