An Al Qaeda wannabe was busted Wednesday on charges he set out to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan with a bogus 1,000-pound bomb he got from an undercover FBI agent, officials said.
Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, a Bangladeshi national living in Jamaica, Queens, boasted that he wanted to destroy America, federal authorities said.
We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom, he said in a videotape he planned to release after detonating the bomb, authorities said.
While en route to his target Wednesday morning, Nafis bragged to his accomplices actually undercovers working for the FBI that he had a Plan B to conduct a suicide bombing operation if cops thwarted his Federal Reserve mission.
Nafis drove the bomb in a van and parked it next to the Federal Reserve on Liberty St., then went to a nearby hotel where he recorded the video taking responsibility for the terrorist attack he was about to commit, officials said.
FBI agents arrested him at the hotel after he repeatedly attempted to use a cellphone to detonate the bomb he thought was real, a law enforcement source said.
Since arriving in the United States in January on a student visa, Nafis researched several possible targets, including the New York Stock Exchange, officials said. He even thought about attacking a high-ranking U.S. official.
Sources told the Daily News that the official was President Obama.
You know what, this election might even stop, he allegedly said of disrupting the campaign.
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DAVID KARP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A Bangladeshi national, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, arrested for plotting to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Manhattan.
Mary Galligan, the FBIs acting assistant director in New York, said Nafis had no qualms about killing or maiming untold numbers of innocent bystanders.
The defendant faces appropriately severe consequences, Galligan said.
She insisted the public was never at risk because the explosives he had accumulated with the help of an undercover FBI agent and an FBI source posing as his accomplices were inert.
But Nafis apparently believed was on a mass killing mission up to the point he tried to set off the bomb.
Nafis devised this attack plan himself and came to the United States for the purpose of carrying out such an attack, said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Lisa Monaco.
In a written statement claiming responsibility, Nafis, quoted our beloved Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that happened three blocks from the Federal Reserve.
With News Wire Services
