Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, the Bangladeshi man caught by an FBI terror sting, considered targeting President Obama before he went ahead with plans for a car-bomb attack on the Federal Reserve, a law-enforcement official told the Associated Press.
The official emphasized that the planning of the assassination "never got beyond the discussion stage," but that's one stage too far, if you ask us. The 21-year-old is now in custody.
In a September meeting with an undercover agent posing as a fellow jihadist, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis explained he chose the Federal Reserve as his car bomb target "for operational reasons," according to a criminal complaint. Nafis also indicated he knew that choice would "cause a large number of civilian casualties, including women and children," the complaint said.
The bomb was phony, but authorities said that Nafis' admiration of Osama bin Laden and aspirations for martyrdom were not.
FBI 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 a fake 1,000-pound the bomb inside a vehicle parked next to the Federal Reserve Wednesday in lower Manhattan, the complaint said.
Nafis appeared in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday 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.
Read more at the Huffington Post.
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