Shelby County Sheriff’s Dept, via Associated Press

Ulugbek Kodirov, a 22-year-old Uzbek man who moved to the United States planning to study medicine in New York, but ended up working in a suburban Alabama mall, was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison on Friday for plotting to kill President Obama on behalf of a jihadist group in Uzbekistan.

As The Associated Press reports, Mr. Kodirov’s lawyer, Lance Bell, blamed the Internet for radicalizing the young man, who moved to Alabama after giving up on a plan to get a medical degree at Columbia University because his English was not good enough. “I’m not calling him a victim,” Mr. Bell said, “but he’s a victim to a degree of social media.”

According to the signed confession in his plea agreement, which was posted online by The Birmingham News in February, the young man hatched his plot to shoot the president after being radicalized while watching jihadist videos online. He then communicated via YouTube with someone he believed to a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

While Mr. Kodirov was detained before the recent debut of the Uzbek social networking site YouFace, a Facebook page registered in his name, which has not been updated in the year since his arrest, lists a handful of friends in Alabama and Tashkent and speaks to a devotion to Islam, as well as basketball and chess.

Like the Facebook profile, a MySpace page registered in the same name describes him as a fan of the game World of Warcraft. While neither social media account contains much personal information, the MySpace page includes one photograph of a young man who appears to be Mr. Kodirov, wearing a heavy winter coat and smiling.

He was arrested exactly one year ago at a motel in Leeds, Ala., in possession of an automatic machine gun, a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight and four hand grenades provided to him by an undercover agent for the American government, posing as a jihadist sympathizer.