NYC bombing suspect charged with terrorism
Man said his goal ‘was to terrorize as many people as possible.’
Prosecutors filed NEW YORK — federal terrorism charges Tuesday against a would-be suicide bomber who was accused of detonating a pipe bomb affixed to his torso inside a Manhattan subway corridor.
The five charges against the bombing suspect, Akayed Ullah, 27, an immigrant from Bangladesh who had lived for several years in Brooklyn, include use of weapons of mass destruction, provision of material support to the Islamic State group and bombing a place of public use, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.
The complaint says that Ullah, who has been held at Bellevue Hospital Center, admitted to inves- tigators that he had built the pipe bomb and carried out the attack.
“I did it for the Islamic State,” he said, according to the complaint.
It says he also told his interrogators that one of his goals in carrying out the attack “was to terrorize as many people as possible.”
“He chose to carry out the attack on a workday because he believed that there would be more people,” the complaint said.
Ullah, while at the hospital, waived his Miranda rights verbally and in writing, the complaint says.
It said Ullah began to be radicalized by at least 2014 and that he viewed Islamic State propaganda online, including a video directing followers to carry out attacks where they were living if they could not join the group’s efforts overseas. Using the internet, Ullah began researching how to build explosives about a year ago, the complaint said. Within the past two to three weeks, it said, he began gathering the materials to construct the bomb: a metal pipe which he filled with explosive material he created; screws to pack inside; and Christmas tree lights and a nine-volt battery to spark its detonation. Then, about one week ago, he built the pipe bomb at his apartment in Brooklyn.
On Monday morning, on the way to the labrynthine subway tunnels of Midtown, the complaint said, Ullah posted a statement on his Facebook page stating, “Trump you failed to protect your nation.”
Investigators are continuing to delve into the past of Ullah, who is believed to have acted alone and chose the spot in a narrow hallway connecting subway stations beneath Times Square for its Christmas-themed posters.
His device, affixed to his torso with plastic zip ties, failed to fully detonate, police said, and Ullah was the only one seriously injured in a blast that sent smoke billowing through the underground passageways of Midtown and snarled a Monday morning commute. Port Authority police officers, who were the first to reach Ullah, found him lying on the ground, injured, the fragments of his partially-detonated device around him and wires connected to the battery in his pants pocket running beneath his jacket
“It didn’t function with the force and power that the recipe intended to,” John J. Miller, the New York Police Department’s commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said about the bomb in an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.”
For that reason, Miller said, the events could have “been far, far worse.”
Ullah used metal screws inside the pipe because, as he told investigators, he believed they would cause “maximum damage,” the complaint says.
After his arrest, the complaint says, investigators who carried out a search of his residence in Brooklyn recovered, among other things: metal pipes; pieces of wire and fragments of what appeared to be Christmas lights; metal screws similar to those found strewn at the bombing scene; and a passport in Ullah’s name with handwritten notes including, “O America, die in your rage.”
The charges against Ullah were announced at a news conference at noon Tuesday by Joon H. Kim, acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan; William F. Sweeney, head of the FBI’s New York office; and Benjamin B. Tucker, the deputy police commissioner.
A day after the Dec. 11 attack, a fuller portrait of Ullah and his motives was emerging as investigators fanned out across New York to track down every lead they could. An official with the state’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, however, said some of law enforcement’s tactics had been too aggressive.
Standing outside the apartment building on Ocean Parkway, in Brooklyn, where Ullah lived, the official said law enforcement officials had held children as young as 4 out in the cold and pulled a teenager out of classes at his high school to interrogate him without a lawyer or his parents present.
“These are not the sorts of actions we expect from our justice system,” Albert Fox Cahn, legal director of the CAIR chapter, said Monday, reading from a statement. “And we have every confidence that our justice system will find the truth behind this attack and that we will, in the end, be able to learn what occurred today.”
Early Tuesday, James Waters, chief of counterterrorism for the Police Department, waved off the complaints during an interview on NY1.
“We always need to balance the rights of the individual freedom, the Constitution, as well as the need to get the job done and the balance of security,” Waters said. “It’s a difficult balance. I think we do it very, very well.”