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| Pedestrians pass the Federal Reserve Building Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in New York. Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested a Bangladeshi man they said was plotting to blow up the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan, just blocks from the World Trade Center site. Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, was arrested in a sting operation Wednesday morning after he parked a van filled with what he believed were explosives outside the building and tried to detonate it in a suicide mission, authorities said. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- A Bangladeshi man who came to the United States to wage jihad was
arrested in an elaborate FBI sting on Wednesday after attempting to blow
up a fake car bomb outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan,
authorities said.
Before trying to carry out
the alleged terrorism plot, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis went to a
warehouse to help assemble a 1,000-pound bomb using inert material,
according to a criminal complaint. He also asked an undercover agent to
videotape him saying, "We will not stop until we attain victory or
martyrdom," the complaint said.
Agents grabbed
the 21-year-old Nafis - armed with a cellphone he believed was rigged
as a detonator - after he made several attempts to blow up the bomb
inside a vehicle parked next to the Federal Reserve, the complaint said.
Authorities
emphasized that the plot never posed an actual risk. However, they
claimed the case demonstrated the value of using sting operations to
neutralize young extremists eager to harm Americans.
"Attempting
to destroy a landmark building and kill or maim untold numbers of
innocent bystanders is about as serious as the imagination can conjure,"
said Mary Galligan, acting head of the FBI's New York office.
"The
defendant faces appropriately severe consequences."
Nafis
appeared in federal court in Brooklyn to face charges of attempting to
use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to provide material
support to al-Qaida. Wearing a brown T-shirt and black jeans, he was
ordered held without bail and did not enter a plea. His defense attorney
had no comment outside court.
The defendant
had sought assurances from an undercover agent posing as an al-Qaida
contact that the terrorist group would support the operation.
"The
thing that I want to do ask you about is that, the thing I'm doing,
it's under al-Qaida?" he was recorded saying during a meeting in bugged
hotel room in Queens, according to the complaint.
In
a September meeting in the same hotel room, Nafis "confirmed he was
ready to kill himself during the course of the attack, but indicated he
wanted to return to Bangladesh to see his family one last time to set
his affairs in order," the complaint said.
But there was no allegation that Nafis actually received training or direction from the terrorist group.
Prosecutors
say Nafis traveled to the U.S. on a student visa in January to carry
out an attack. In July, he contacted a confidential informant, telling
him he wanted to form a terror cell, the criminal complaint said. Nafis
was living in Queens.
In further
conversations, authorities said Nafis proposed several spots for his
attack, including the New York Stock Exchange - and that in a written
letter taking responsibility for the Federal Reserve job he was about to
carry out, he said he wanted to "destroy America." Other communications
took place through Facebook, the complaint said.
The
bank in New York, located at 33 Liberty St., is one of 12 branches
around the country that, along with the Board of Governors in
Washington, make up the Federal Reserve System that serves as the
central bank of the United States. It sets interest rates.
The
Federal Reserve is one of the most fortified buildings in the city,
smack in the middle of a massive security effort headed by the New York
Police Department where a network of thousands of private and police
cameras watch for suspicious activity.
The
department uses sophisticated programs that can search for suspicious
activity, like an object in one place for a long time, at the building
modeled after London's "ring of steel." The analytic software also is
designed to take video and catalog it according to movements, shapes and
colors, so officers can set parameters to search the system for, say, a
suspicious van.
The Fed is also home to the
world's largest accumulation of gold, according to the bank's website.
Dozens of governments and central banks store a portion of their gold
reserves in high-security vaults deep beneath the building. In recent
years, it held 216 million troy ounces of gold, or more than a fifth of
all global monetary gold reserves, making it a bigger bullion depository
than Fort Knox.
The federal case was the latest where a terrorism plot against the city turned out to be a sting operation.
Four
men were convicted in 2009 in a plot to bomb synagogues and shoot down
military planes with missiles - a case that began after an FBI informant
was assigned to infiltrate a mosque in Newburgh, about 70 miles north
of New York City. The federal judge hearing the case said she was not
proud of the government's role in nurturing the plot.
In
2004, a Pakistani immigrant was arrested and convicted for a scheme to
blow up the subway station at Herald Square in Midtown. His lawyers
argued that their client had been set up by a police informant who
showed him pictures of Iraq abuse to get him involved in an attack
against civilians.
