Faisal Shahzad pleads guilty, warns of more attacks

Declaring himself a ‘Muslim soldier’, Faisal Shahzad, a US citizen born in Pakistan, admitted on Monday that he tried to blow up an explosives-packed Nissan Pathfinder on May 1 at Times Square.

Wearing a white knit skullcap and a blue jumpsuit, Shahzad gave a blow-by-blow account of his transformation from a married Connecticut accountant to a mujahideen who travelled to Pakistan for training in handling explosives. He warned of more attacks and accused the US of “terrorising” Muslim nations and its people.

“One has to understand where I’m coming from,” Shahzad, 30, told Manhattan federal court judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who asked him whether he worried that he could have killed children at Times Square.

“I consider myself... a Muslim soldier. It’s a war to kill people,” he declared.
Shahzad warned of more attacks if the US did not get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. “We will be attacking the US,” said Shahzad, adding that Americans “only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die”.

The guilty plea, which came less than two months after Shahzad’s arrest, during a routine court hearing on Monday, took prosecutors by surprise. It marks an extraordinarily quick end to a case that dramatises what the Obama administration calls a sobering new reality — home-grown terrorists. In the past year alone, there have been over a dozen cases in the US involving jihadist plots, some involving American radicals, but others with direct links to extremist groups in Pakistan. In the rogue’s gallery, David Coleman Headley leaps to mind.

“In admitting his guilt today, Shahzad reminded us of the uniquely serious threat that our city faces every single day,” said Preet Bharara, a US attorney in Manhattan.

An indictment handed up by a federal grand jury last week says Shahzad received terrorism training in Pakistan and $12,000 in two instalments. Pakistan has arrested two people believed to have played a role in the plot, though no one has been charged. Three men in Massachusetts and Maine suspected of supplying money to Shahzad have also been detained.

Shahzad entered a guilty plea in court without cutting any plea deal with federal prosecutors, so he faces a life prison term when sentenced on October 5.