Welcome to episode 364 of FBI case file review with Jerry Williams. I'm a retired agent on a mission

to show you who the FBI is and what the FBI does through my books, my blog, and my podcast case reviews with former colleagues.

Today, we get to speak to retired agent Raj Patel, who served in the FBI for 20 years.

In this episode, he reviews the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings,

where eight ISIS-inspired suicide subjects detonated themselves in three

large Western hotels and three churches, killing 270 people, including five Americans.

Raj was on the Los Angeles field offices extraterritorial squad at the time of the bombings,

and was designated one of two lead

case agents. He was deployed to Sri Lanka for approximately 75 days split between two deployments,

at which time he gathered the evidence to successfully indict three non-United States persons

for providing material support to terrorism.

He and other members of the team received the 2021 Director's Award for Most Outstanding International

Investigation. Raj was assigned to the Los Angeles field office where he initially worked on a

cyber intrusion squad,

and eventually the sexual assault felony enforcement team, SAFE, where he served for approximately

12 years. While on the SAFE team, he became a subject matter expert in child exploitation

investigations focusing on child sex tourism cases. This work led to several

operational deployments in temporary duties to Cambodia and Thailand. Raj later transferred to the

extraterritorial squad where he worked counterterrorism matters in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

During this assignment, he completed multiple deployments, including embedding with the Joint Special Operations Command, conducting interrogations.

His next assignment was to the L.A. Division's Violent Crimes and Major offender squad, where he specialized in kidnappings,

extortion, and threats to life, after which he was promoted to supervise the violent crimes

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