Faisal Shahzad, Times Square bomb suspect in custody - 12:16 p.m. Two arrested in Pakistan

washingtonpost.com ^ | May 4, 2020 | Karin Brulliard

[Syncro]

Faisal Shahzad, Times Square bomb suspect in custody -- Live Updates

12:16 p.m. Two arrested in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD -- An intelligence official who was not authorized to speak on the record said two arrests had been made in Karachi in connection with the bombing attempt. One arrested is named Tausif Ahmed, and he is believed to have traveled to the United States recently to meet with Shahzad, according to this official

[cardinal4]

I wonder what they were probed with. Hopefully a cattle prod..

[GovernmentShrinker]

Especially when you want to find out as much as possible. He was being followed and closely monitored as he proceeded to the plane

It's possible that they let him get that far on purpose, since it offers pretty irrefutable proof that he was attempting to flee to a foreign country. Also possible that there was discussion of letting him go, if Dubai and Pakistani officials could be pinned down on specific commitments to limit his movements afterwards.

Things were happening quickly, with a lot of agencies, both domestic and foreign, involved. It may be that they originally wanted to let him lead them to his associates, but then were able to determine who his associates were before the flight departed.

In the world of intelligence, things are rarely as they appear. For all we know, there may have been a dozen FBI, CIA, Dubai, Pakistani, and UAE intel operatives seated on that flight, all assigned to keep tabs on Mr. Shahzad.

[grumpygresh]

Let’s blame those evil banks! I’m sure this guy was an anti-government zealot that listened and took orders from Rush, just as Bill Clinton predicted.

[kcvl]

Pakistani media are reporting that Shahzad is from Karachi and spent significant time in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, where the government is waging a fierce war against Taliban militants.

A Pakistani government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told TIME on Tuesday that the suspect had ties with militants while in Pakistan. “He was here at a training camp,” the source said. The source also claimed that members of Shahzad’s family were arrested in Karachi on Tuesday morning.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1986885,00.html#ixzz0myykw6tP

[seeker41]

Hi Sync-What up!

Grunion hunt time......

[kcvl]

In Pakistan, an intelligence official said authorities arrested at least two people in the southern port city of Karachi in connection with the Times Square bombing attempt. The official, who is not authorized to speak on the record, identified one of those arrested as Tausif Ahmed, who was picked up in a busy commercial neighborhood called Gulshan-e-Iqbal. He said Ahmed reportedly traveled two months ago to the United States to meet with Shahzad. The official did not have the other suspect’s name.

Pakistani television stations reported that as many as five other people with links to the alleged plot may have been arrested in the central industrial city of Faisalabad, but those reports could not immediately be confirmed.

Shahzad is from Pabbi, the main town of Nowshera District in northwestern Pakistan, near Peshawar, according to Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik.

A source close to the United Arab Emirates said Shahzad’s name was placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list around midday Monday but that the suspect was not stopped before he bought a ticket and checked in for Emirates Airlines Flight 202 to Dubai, where he planned to change planes and fly on to Pakistan.

Instead, the airline noted that Shahzad made his reservation on the way to the airport and paid cash for the flight, alerting U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the source said.

“The question is, when did they become aware of his presence at the airport, and when was he put on the list?” the source said, describing a dialogue among the U.S. and UAE governments and the airline over responsibility for Shahzad’s boarding of the aircraft.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050400192.html?hpid=topnews

[Art in Idaho]

Big Red Flag on immigration "reform". The guy becomes a citizen as a cover + Holder will come to his rescue. Start a moratorium on immigration for anyone from the Middle-East? Need a complete conservative review of our immigration laws/policies after Sarah gets in. Forget Amnesty. . . . don't even think about it!

[kcvl]

Sources: Suspect Should Have Been On Watch List

Authorities Questioning As Many As 8 People In Connection To Times Square Bombing

Sources also told CBS News on Tuesday morning that multiple people have been taken into custody for questioning in Pakistan in connection with the bomb plot.

Authorities are not saying who the potential suspects are or where they are being held, but they say there were raids Monday night and Tuesday morning in different locations. It’s believed between four and eight people are being held, and there are reports that some of them may be related to the suspect arrested overnight in New York.

Congressman Peter King said he was not surprised given what law enforcement sources were telling him.

“The question is is he working with people over seas or is there just a connection to overseas?” said Rep. King, R-Long Island. “It’s definite that the authorities believe that there is an overseas involvement, generally a potential overseas involvement, and it involves the Middle East.”

http://wcbstv.com/breakingnewsalerts/times.square.car.2.1672788.html

[Hunton Peck]

Meanwhile, over at Loon Central MSNBC, there's heartache and mourning that it wasn't one of those evil teabaggers, instead of a bunch more nice, misunderstood Muslim boys.

[Art in Idaho]

“The question is is he working with people over seas or is there just a connection to overseas?” said Rep. King, R-Long Island. “It’s definite that the authorities believe that there is an overseas involvement, generally a potential overseas involvement, and it involves the Middle East."

When are we going to get serious about profiling and a moratorium on immigration from the Middle-East? When NYC and Washington D.C. are burning?

[AuntB]

“Big Red Flag on immigration “reform”. The guy becomes a citizen as a cover + Holder will come to his rescue. Start a moratorium on immigration for anyone from the Middle-East? Need a complete conservative review of our immigration laws/policies after Sarah gets in. Forget Amnesty. . . . don’t even think about it! “

_____________

Limbaugh was just saying this guy had become a US citizen only a year ago.

This entire mess rests on our screwy/PC immigration system.
Latinos and Muslims get first crack, to appease them.
A couple years ago USCIS (agency in charge) lost 30,000 files they were to vet...so they just approved them instead, with no vetting.

Decent immigrants are put in the back of the line. They serve no purpose to push this country into socialism/anarchy.

People keep saying we allow 1 million Legal entries every year...WRONG. It’s closer to 4 million every year...and growing.

Take a look at just what USCIS does. Last year we gave over a million citizenship, then there are the dozens of visas to suit just about anyone. And remember all those refugees who get ‘temp legal status’...those are given out by the State Dept and not even counted in the uscis numbers.

“A Day in the Life of USCIS”- (Is this any way to protect our nation?)

[snip]

http://uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/DayinLife_050629.pdf (click here to see orignial document)

Some of the DAILY work of USIS according to their own document:

* Conduct 135,000 national security background checks

* process 30,000 applications for immigrant benefits

* Issue 7,000 permanent resident cards (green cards -PER DAY)

* Welcome 2100 new citizens.

* Welcome 3500 new permanent residents.

http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2006/04/day-in-life-of-uscis-is-this-any-way.html

[BP2]

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
In Shelton, former neighbor Brenda Thurman told the New York Times that Shahzad and his wife, Huma Mian, spoke limited English and kept mostly to themselves. The couple had two young children, a girl and a boy, she said.

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.

Pakistani police told NBC News that Shahzad traveled from the United States to Karachi on July 3, 2009, returning to the United States on Aug. 8, 2009. During that time, he is believed to have traveled to Peshawar, a major city in the region bordering Afghanistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Claims to have acted alone
Shahzad was taken into custody late Monday by FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives at Kennedy Airport after boarding a flight to Dubai, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and other officials.

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."

Shahzad, who was born in Pakistan and became a U.S. citizen last year, had recently returned from another trip to Pakistan, this time for five months, according to law enforcement sources. They said his wife was in Pakistan. It is believed that Shahzad's Pakistani relatives reside in a middle-class neighborhood of Karachi called North Nazimabad, NBC said.

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.

Video: Suspect arrested in NYC bomb plot

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.

Some of the recent arrests include Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, charged with fatally shooting 13 people last year at Fort Hood, Texas; Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-area airport shuttle driver who pleaded guilty in February in a plot to bomb New York subways; and a Pennsylvania woman Colleen LaRose, who authorities say became radicalized online as "Jihad Jane" and plotted to kill a Swedish artist whose work offended Muslims.

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/?

[Uncle Chip]

two arrests had been made in Karachi in connection with the bombing attempt.

the two loan sharks that foreclosed on his home???

[ohioWfan]

But they foreclosed on his home, so he has a REASON to kill innocent Americans.

Don't you get it???

[left that other site]

Well then THAT Settles it.

NO more granting of mortgages or loans to any persons of Middle Eastern or Muslim extraction.

There is a correlation now between the possibility of the inability to repay the loan in a timely manner, and resulting stress-related BOMBING incidents./sarc

[Art in Idaho]

Thanks for the good info AuntB. Immigration just one area that needs a complete overhaul. Guess we'll have to wait for The Big Crisis or 2012 until rationality prevails. . . You reach a point where you see So Many things need to be changed - if our Sacred Republic is going to survive.

[BigFinn]

What I wonder is who and what has been supporting this professional student all these years. The taliban or the American taxpayer. STOP ALL IMMIGRATION NOW.

[Road Warrior ‘04]

Suspect should never have got on plane: NY mayor‎

Suspect should never have been called "an amateur lone wold white guy who was against Bowrama's health care plan" either should he, Bloomberg! Bloomberg is an egotistical, head up his ass, liberal!

[Carling]

Gee, maybe if the poor foreclosed-upon Pakistani had been here working to pay his bills instead of flying to Pakistan to get terrorist training, he'd still have his house and he wouldn't have tried to blow up innocent citizens. /sar

CNN is garbage.

[Sarah Barracuda]

He just admitted to taking bomb training courses in Pakistan