A prominent man in Minnesota’s Somali community is the first person to go on record to speak of how Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother so he could gain US citizenship.
Abdihakim Osman admitted to the Daily Mail that Omar “needed to get papers for her brother, Ahmed Elmi, to go to school” so they wed in a secret ceremony on Feb. 12, 2009.
The marriage to Elmi came several years after Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in a non-legal Muslim ceremony in 2002 that was never registered with the state of Minnesota.
The Daily Mail reports:
Osman, who runs a popular Facebook blog called Xerta Shekh, which comments on Somali issues, said that Omar kept her marriage to Elmi quiet, with no one from the Somali community invited to the wedding.
He explained: 'When [Hirsi] and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community.
'I would say there were 100-150 people there.'
But, he said: 'When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it.'
Osman said at the time Hirsi was better known than Omar among Somalis. 'He was a footballer, he promoted a lot of Somali shows, he was very popular.
'So the scandal was about [Hirsi's] brother-in-law more than Ilhan's brother.'
It has long been rumored that Omar and Elmi are brother and sister.
But because of a lack of paperwork in war-torn Somalia where they were both born, positive proof of their relationship has never been uncovered.
The first report that Omar and her husband were siblings appeared on the website Somalispot in 2016. It said of Elmi, 34: 'As soon as Ilhan Omar married him he started university at her alma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012.
Last month, New York Post reported that the FBI was investigating the marriage and had met with a source in Minneapolis who handed over “a trove of documents” related to the marriage.