By Rich Bockmann
The al-Qaeda-inspired, wannabe terrorist who flipped the switch on a phony bomb he planted outside the Federal Reserve bank in Manhattan was sentenced to 30 years in prison last week, the top prosecutor in Brooklyn said.
Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a Bangladeshi national who was living in Jamaica when he tried to blow up the federal building last fall, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison Aug. 8 in Brooklyn federal court, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District said.
Nafis, 22, had pleaded guilty in February to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction after the Federal Bureau of Investigation snared him in an anti-terror sting operation.
“Nafis came to the United States radicalized and bent on fighting jihad here in our homeland. He sought to commit mass murder in downtown Manhattan in the name of al-Qaeda,” said U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch. “The prospect of widespread death and destruction could not dissuade him from his deadly plan. Nafis’ goals of martyrdom and carnage were thwarted by the vigilance of law enforcement. He will now spend the next 30 years where his own actions have landed him, in a federal prison cell.”
Prosecutors said Nafis came to the United States in January 2012 hell-bent on waging jihad against the country and actively sought out al-Qaeda contacts who could help him carry out an attack.
But while trying to organize a terrorist cell, Nafis unknowingly reached out to an FBI informant who tipped off the feds, prosecutors said.
During the sting operation, Nafis proposed striking high-profile targets such as the New York Stock Exchange before deciding on the Federal Reserve bank on Liberty Street, they said. Nafis went on to buy parts to put together a detonator, and an undercover FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda middle-man supplied him with 20 50-pound bags of phony explosives, according to court records.
On the morning of Oct. 17, 2012 the federal agent drove a van into the city as Nafis worked to assemble what he believed was a weapon of mass destruction. The two parked the van outside the federal building and went to a nearby hotel where Nafis recorded a video boasting “we will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,” according to prosecutors.
He then used a mobile-phone-cum-detonator and repeatedly tried to set his “bomb” off before agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him.
Nafis, who has been held without bail since his arrest in October was sentenced by Chief Judge Carol Amon in Brooklyn federal court.
Reach reporter Rich Bockmann by e-mail at rbockmann@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
