Sunday, November 20, 2011

New York police arrest "lone wolf" bomb-making suspect

AFP/Reuters November 20, 2011 9:43 PM

NEW YORK - 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 U.S. raid earlier this year.

“He talked about changing his name to Osama Hussein, to celebrate his heroes, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein,” Kelly said.

Kelly said Pimentel, a native of the Dominican Republic who was a U.S. 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.

“We think what set him off was the elimination of Anwar al-Awlaqi,” Kelly said.

Awlaqi, suspected of involvement in several attacks on the United States and of recruiting Americans for his cause, was killed in an air strike in Yemen in late September. Some called it an extrajudicial killing by U.S. forces.

In an interview with New York police, Pimentel admitted he “took active steps to build the bomb, including shaving the match heads and drilling holes in the pipes” and was “one hour away from completing it,” the court documents said.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks by al Qaeda militants in 2001, New York City has considered itself a prime target and has developed extensive intelligence and counterterrorism divisions within the New York Police Department.

New Yorkers have grown accustomed to heightened security and regular announcements that authorities have foiled plots to attack the city.

Most planned attacks - such as that linked to the September 2009 arrest of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born man who was a permanent U.S. resident living in Colorado who plotted a suicide bomb attack on the New York subway system - were aspirational. Zazi later pleaded guilty.

But some, such as the failed May 2010 attempt to bomb the city’s Times Square, were closer to being carried out.

In that case, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, Faisal Shahzad, drove a sport utility vehicle packed with a crude bomb into the heart of Times Square on a crowded Saturday evening. The bomb failed to go off and was discovered by passersby.

The suspect was later arrested and pleaded guilty.
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

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