 | Well done, NYPD Intelligence Department! |
(AFP) - New York authorities announced Sunday they had arrested and charged a US Al-Qaeda sympathizer in a plot to build a pipe bomb to kill government workers, elected officials and others.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said 27-year-old Jose Pimentel was targeting police, postal facilities and others and said he was a "lone wolf" without affiliation to foreign terrorist organizations.
City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Pimentel, though not affiliated with an outside group, was a follower of slain radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi, who was killed in a US raid earlier this year.
Kelly said Pimentel, a native of the Dominican Republic who was a US citizen, had followed a online magazine from Awlaqi including an article "How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom."
Pimentel "talked about killing US servicemen returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly US army and marine corps personnel. He talked about bombing post offices in and around Washington Heights and police cars in New York City, as well as a police station in New Jersey," the police chief said.
The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least a year, first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.
Mr. Pimentel, who is also known as Muhammad Yusuf, will face charges that include criminal possession of a weapon in the first degree as a crime of terrorism, which is considered an A-1 violent felony.
Mr. Pimentel made incriminating statements to an informant who was working with the Police Department, investigators said, and those conversations were recorded.
"He was in the process of building three pipe bombs," the law enforcement official said. "We weren't going to wait around to figure out what he wanted do with his bombs. He was in Harlem about an hour from actually assembling the bombs," but had all the "unassembled components ready to go."
| Including nails for shrapnel. |
The police commissioner identified the suspect as a follower of Anwar al-Awlaki. Pimental allegedly tried to contact al-Awlaki directly, but never got a response.
Pimentel had been monitored by authorities since 2009 and his extreme positions "made some of his like-minded friends nervous," said Kelly.
| I am truly grateful the CIA taught the NYPD all that spy stuff that the New York Times, et al were fussing about a few months ago. |
His aim, the police commissioner said, was to show there were "mujahedeen" -- or Islamic militants -- in the city ready to wage "jihad."
He was arrested at 3:30 p.m. Saturday in an apartment in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan, after he began to drill holes in the would-be pipe bomb, Kelly said.
The unemployed pothead converted to Islam in 2009 in while living in Schenectady, NY, where he caught the eye of local police. After he started beating his wife to encourage her to join him in conversion, and forcing their child to watch jihadi videos, she took the child and left. Following his return to NYC, his mother threw him out because of his radicalism, so he moved in with an uncle. The Schenectady police tipped off the NYPD, who apparently bugged the uncle's apartment for sound and video,
| Somebody got to watch him scrape the sulfur heads off of 700 matches... |
put a tap on his computer, and sent an informant
| *ring, ring* "Mahmoud the Weasel, at your service!" |
to be his friend. Like Santa Claus, the police know where he's been, what he's done, read, and posted on his website since he moved back to New York. Our lad confessed all, insisting that "Islamic law obligated all true Muslims to wage war against the United States."
| The wonder being how few have acted on that obligation, and how many of those were lone wolves. You'd think the Muslim community would be trumpeting that with pride. |
According to Mayor Bloomberg, this is the fourteenth jihadi plot against New York City since 9/11. |