Bomber is full of hate — & hunger
A 97-YEAR-OLD Pearl Harbor survivor living in Brooklyn is under siege yet again — this time by his landlord.
The Rev. James Blakely says he’s getting the boot from his studio apartment in BedfordStuyvesant even though it was gifted to him rent-free five years ago.
“They’re trying to put me out. It’s injustice,” grumbled the U.S. Navy veteran from his tidy home with an American flag hanging outside the front window. “I don’t know what’s going to happen . ... I don’t feel good. I got no place else to go.”
Blakely’s once-heartwarming tale began in 2012 when thenDaily News columnist Denis Hamill found him living out of a trailer with no running water in a junkyard on Buffalo Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
A war hero who earned Navy combat stars in Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Luzon, Blakely had been sleeping in the ramshackle trailer for nearly a year.
The story documenting his sad plight caught the attention of the city Department of the Aging.
Three days later, on July 20, 2012, Blakely was literally dancing across the polished-wood floors of his new home on Bergen St. The furnished digs were CONVICTED CHELSEA terror bomber Ahmad Khan Rahimi is keeping busy behind bars — launching a hunger strike and spreading his doctrine of hate among fellow inmates.
The Elizabeth, N.J., man (photo) began sowing the seeds of terror among other prisoners around the time of his October conviction for planting homemade bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey, authorities said.
Rahimi “has been distributing propaganda and publications issued by terrorist organizations,” wrote Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim.
“The materials included, among other things, speeches and lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama Bin Laden; books on Jihad (and) bomb-making instructions.”
According to Kim, the pro-terror proselytizing at times occurred during Friday Jumu’ah prayer sessions at the Metropolitan Correction Center.
The imprisoned bomber appeared more concerned with his inability to meet with visitors, including his wife and children, than with the allegations.
“I am extremely frustrated and physically tired and mentally drained of the continuous run around,” Rahimi recently wrote to Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Berman. “I have decided to go on a hunger strike since Friday December 8, 2017.”
Rahimi, 29, faces a mandatory sentence of life behind bars at his Jan. 18 sentencing in Manhattan Federal Court. A lawyer for the terrorist did not return an email seeking comment.
He was convicted of detonating a pressure-cooker bomb that injured 30 people on W. 23rd St. on Sept. 17, 2016. The homemade device, packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, sent shrapnel flying through the streets of Chelsea.
Hours earlier on the same day, he planted a device in Seaside Park, N.J., along the route of a Marine Corps charity run.
A delay in the race’s start spared all participants from injury.