Boston Herald October 18, 2012

FBI foils wannabe N.Y. bomber

By Matt Stout

A Bangladeshi man busted in a sting operation yesterday after authorities said he tried blowing up a bogus car bomb outside Manhattan’s Federal Reserve Building appears to be just the latest example of an inexperienced and inept wannabe jihadi, experts said.

“The first rule in planning a terrorist attack is not to make any new friends,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “If someone wants to do something that entails getting help from other people, the FBI is going to catch them. The common thread in all of these foiled plots, the people that they catch look stupid. It’s because they are.”

Agents yesterday nabbed Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis — armed with a cellphone he believed was rigged as a detonator — after he made several attempts to blow up what he thought was a bomb inside a vehicle parked next to the Federal Reserve, according to a criminal complaint.

But the 21-year-old — in the country since January on a student visa — had been working with an FBI informant who helped him help assemble a 1,000-pound bomb using fake material, according to the complaint. He also asked an undercover agent to videotape him.

“We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,” Nafis said, according to the complaint.

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-Qaeda. Wearing a brown T-shirt and black jeans, he was ordered held without bail and did not enter a plea.

In a September meeting in a bugged Queens 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.

Authorities emphasized that the plot never posed an actual risk. They also noted that the case highlighted how well sting operations can neutralize stateside extremists.

The Bay State is all too familiar with them. Convicted terrorist Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury is serving more than 17 years for conspiring to murder U.S. troops in Iraq, and Ashland’s Rezwan Ferdaus is slated to be sentenced Nov. 1 after pleading guilty to charges he plotted to blow up the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with bomb-laden, remote-controlled model airplanes.

Federal authorities referred to Ferdaus as a “lone wolf,” and yesterday there were no allegations that Nafis actually received training or direction from al-Qaeda.

Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis University, said lone wolves are notoriously ineffective.

“You need to have support contacts, you need to have training in how to construct a bomb,” she said. “Law enforcement provided them with a network they need in order to put together an attack. ... I think that we have to take it as evidence of effectiveness of counterterrorism.”

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.