We’ve all heard it, – Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, who had recently returned from a five-month trip to his native Pakistan, was arrested at a New York airport on charges that he drove a bomb-laden SUV meant to cause a fireball in Times Square, federal authorities said.
Shahzad was on board a Dubai-bound flight at Kennedy Airport when FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives took him into custody late Monday, law enforcement officials said. The airport in Dubai is the Middle East’s busiest and a major transit point for passengers traveling between the West and much of Asia, particularly India and Pakistan.
The SUV was parked on Saturday night on a busy midtown Manhattan Street near the offices of Viacom Inc., which owns Comedy Central. The network recently aired an episode of the animated show “South Park” that the group Revolution Muslim had complained insulted the Prophet Muhammad by depicting him in a bear costume….
Whose prophet? – Oh no, – NOT another act of Jihad! Did you read that word in the news paper? Did you hear it on TV? – Not once, by anyone in the Obama administration, are the words “Muslim” or “Islam” connected with “terrorism”.
The explosive device inside the had cheap-looking alarm clocks connected to a 16-ounce can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to detonate gas cans and set propane tanks afire in a chain reaction “to cause mayhem, to create casualties,” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
A metal rifle cabinet placed in the SUV’s cargo area was packed with fertilizer, but NYPD bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terrorist bombings. – Good, that he chose the wrong fertilizer!
Police said the SUV bomb could have produced “a significant fireball” and sprayed shrapnel with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows.
A vendor alerted a police officer to the parked SUV, which was smoking. Times Square, clogged with tourists on a warm evening, was shut down for 10 hours. A bomb squad dismantled the explosive device, and no one was hurt.
“It’s clear,” he said, “that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans.”
More than a dozen people with American citizenship or residency, like Shahzad, have been accused in the past two years of supporting or carrying out terrorism attempts on U.S. soil, cases that illustrate the threat of violent extremism from within the U.S.
Among them are Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, charged with fatally shooting 13 people last year at Fort Hood, Texas; Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-area airport shuttle driver who pleaded guilty in February in a plot to bomb New York subways; and a Pennsylvania woman who authorities say became radicalized online as “Jihad Jane” and plotted to kill a Swedish artist whose work offended Muslims.
After authorities pulled Shahzad off the plane, he admitted he was behind the crude Times Square car bomb, officials said. He also claimed to have been trained at a terror camp in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region of Waziristan, according to court documents. That raised increased concern that the bombing was an international terror plot.
According to an official who spoke to The Associated Press Shahzad, the son of a former top Pakistani air force officer came to the United States in late 1998 on a student visa. He took classes at the now-defunct Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., and then enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer applications and information systems in 2000.
That’s how they come into this country. They study at our universities, and during their free time they train for Jihad.
The car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. It wasn’t the work of a lonely extremist or a tea party member. How do we know? Because Faisal Shahzad attended a Jihad training camp in Pakistan. He just recently spent five months in that country, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which came to the surface when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.
Lilos SWI Blogs 