 Brenda Thurman, a former neighbor of Faisal Shahzad, said this Facebook photo shows Shahzad with an unidentified woman and child. (Facebook via New Haven Ind.)
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 12:50 p.m. CT, Tues., May 4, 2010
The suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on a Connecticut home and the Shelton property is now in foreclosure, according to court records. The foreclosure records show that Faisal Shahzad took out the mortgage in 2004 and that he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian. Chase Home Finance LLC sued Shahzad, 30, in September to force the foreclosure. The case is pending in Milford Superior Court. Former neighbors in Shelton described him as a family man who reportedly said he worked on Wall Street. After being forced to leave the Shelton home, Shahzad moved to a home in Bridgeport, Conn., and FBI agents searched that property early Tuesday, removing filled plastic bags. A bomb squad came and went without entering as local police and FBI agents gathered in the cordoned-off street. Kept to themselves Thurman told the newspaper that the couple had lived at the house at 119 Long Hill Ave. for about three years before moving out last year. "He was a little bit strange," she told the Associated Press. "He didn't like to come out during the day." Thurman showed reporters a laptop computer showing a Facebook photo of her neighbor, the New Haven Independent reported. The photo showed Shahzad with a woman and a child. Another neighbor, Audrey Sokol, said she thought Shahzad worked in nearby Norwalk. Sokol, a teacher, said that he would wave and say hello and that he seemed normal to her. The Shelton home is a two-story grayish-brown colonial with a sloping yard in a working-class neighborhood. On Tuesday morning, the home looked as if it had been unoccupied for a while. Shahzad left around May 2009, Thurman said, and his wife followed about a month later. Claims to have acted alone Investigators still don't have evidence that Shahzad is connected to the Pakistani Taliban or any foreign terror groups. Said one government source: "He's claimed to have acted alone, but these are things that have to be investigated." The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Shahzad had ties to the United States dating back to at least December 1998, when he was granted an F-1 student visa. Immigration officials said then that there was “no derogatory information” on Shahzad in any database, a law enforcement official said in the Journal’s report. Shahzad attended Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., then transferred in 2000 to the University of Bridgeport, Conn., where he received a B.A. in computer science and engineering, according to the Journal. The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan was handling the case and said Shahzad would appear in court Tuesday.
More than a dozen people with American citizenship or residency have been accused in the past two years of supporting or carrying out terrorism attempts on U.S. soil, cases that illustrate the threat of violent extremism from within the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder alluded to the ongoing threat during a briefing on Tuesday. "As months, even years go by without a successful terrorist attack, the most dangerous lesson we can draw is a false impression that this threat no longer exists," he said.
The Associated Press, Reuters and NBC's Carol Grisanti contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36934331/ns/us_news-security/? |