Times Square car bomber details his chilling plot

SELF-CONFESSED terrorist Faisal Shahzad was so eager to tell how he plotted to kill Americans in Times Square he went to court with a prepared statement.

But US District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum refused to hear him read it, instead challenging the Pakistan-born American citizen to just say “what happened”.

In an unapologetic, matter-of-fact courtroom colloquy that followed, Shahzad offered chilling details about how he trained with the Pakistani Taliban to build bombs, then returned to the US to launch an attack that would avenge attacks on Muslims by US forces overseas.

“One has to understand where I’m coming from,” he said in an unusual departure from tightly scripted guilty pleas, with his defence attorney and prosecutors sitting in silence in federal court in Manhattan. “I consider myself... a Muslim soldier.”

Shahzad, 30, admitted leaving an SUV rigged with a homemade bomb in bustling Times Squares on a warm night on May 1. The bomb failed to go off, and he was arrested trying to leave the country on a Dubai-bound flight two days later.

Authorities say following his capture, Shahzad voluntarily started talking about the botched bombing right away – a pattern that continued in open court, where he agreed to plead guilty to 10 terrorism and weapons counts without the benefit of a plea deal and with certainty he would face life in prison.

“I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over,” he said.

Until US forces leave Muslim territory, he added, “we will be attacking US”.

When led into court, he had on a white skull cap and prisoner’s uniform, his beard shaggy and his demeanour full of pride and absent of remorse.

Shahzad traced his plot to a 2009 trip to Pakistan that began only three months after he received his US citizenship.

During the trip, he said he sought and received five days’ training in explosives from the Pakistani Taliban in the lawless Waziristan region before returning to the US in February to pursue a one-man scheme to bring death and destruction to New York.

The indictment said he received $5,000 (€4,064) in cash on February 25 from an unnamed co-conspirator in Pakistan and $7,000 (€5,690) more on April 10, sent at the co-conspirator’s direction. Shahzad said in court the Pakistani Taliban also gave him more than $4,000 (€3,252) when he left the training camp.

He explained that he loaded his vehicle with three bomb components, hoping to set off a fertiliser-fuelled bomb packed in a gun cabinet, a set of propane tanks and gas canisters rigged with fireworks to explode into a fireball. He also revealed he was carrying a folding assault rifle in a laptop computer case for “self-defence”.

Shahzad said he expected the bomb to begin going off after he lighted a fuse and waited between two and a half minutes and five minutes for it to erupt.

“I was waiting to hear a sound, but I couldn’t hear any sound... So I just walked to Grand Central (Terminal), and I went home,” he said.

Authorities say the bomb malfunctioned, emitting smoke that attracted the attention of an alert street vendor, who notified police, setting in motion a rapid evacuation of blocks of a city still healing from the shock of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. At a minimum, police said, the explosive had potential to harm nearby pedestrians and damage buildings with flames and shrapnel.

The judge kept up a steady back-and-forth with Shahzad, questioning how it was possible he pulled off the near-bombing solo.

“You built the bomb all by yourself?” she asked.

“Yes... Nobody helped me,” he replied.

Sentencing for Shahzad was set for October 5.