Muhammad Omar was arrested Thursday afternoon after he allegedly jumped from a fourth-floor balcony earlier in the day, capping a dramatic search that unfolded just as federal officials prepared to announce fraud charges against him and 14 others. Authorities said he was taken into custody at around 3 p.m. Thursday.
Omar is one of 15 defendants accused of defrauding Minnesota programs out of a combined $90 million, and court records show he faces one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and four counts of health care fraud. Prosecutors say he worked with Ibrahim Bashir Abdi to create North Home Health Care and later opened South Home Health Care, companies that were registered with Minnesota's Housing Stabilization program.
Authorities say the two men falsified and inflated the number of service hours provided by North Home, while some of the patients they said they were caring for were actually hospitalized and others were dead. Officials say Omar and Abdi pocketed $3.2 million based on false claims, and Omar received an additional $480,000 through claims from South Home. Charges say some of the money was sent overseas to buy property in Kenya.
The case reaches beyond one pair of companies. Federal officials said the fraud targeted seven Medicaid programs, including Minnesota's Housing Stabilization program, the autism program, Integrated Community Support and the state's Individualized Home Supports program. The arrests and charges also fit a broader pattern that has put pressure on Medicaid oversight in Minnesota, an issue that has drawn national attention in reporting such as Jonathan Fahey's look at a Medicaid fraud bust in the state and Theo Baker's work tracing fraud and institutional rot in a Stanford case.
At a news conference, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. pointed to a surge in spending in the early intervention development program as evidence of the scale of the scheme. He said, “This was the cost of the early intervention development program in 2020,” adding, “It was $38.1 million.” Kennedy said, “Instead, this year it hit $442 million,” and described that jump as, “[That's] the magnitude of the fraud and the damage that we're talking about today.”
The balance of the case now moves into court, where Omar's charges, the alleged role of the two companies and the flow of money will be tested against federal evidence. What is already clear is that the government says the losses were not a bookkeeping error but a coordinated fraud that ran through multiple programs, crossed state lines and, by prosecutors' account, helped finance property abroad.
