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NEW YORK — Two men were arrested Friday night, a little more than two days before the start of the Republican National Convention, accused of conspiring to bomb a subway station and other high-profile targets here. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, announcing the arrests at a press conference yesterday, said that the suspects — one a Pakistani national, the other a U.S. citizen — had been under surveillance for a year. The two men, identified as Shahawar Matin Siraj, 21, a Pakistani who lives in Queens, and James El Shafay, 19, a U.S. citizen living on Staten Island, were...

Pakistani convicted for plot to bomb New York subway05-25-2006, 00h32 NEW YORK (AFP) In this courtroom illustration, James Elshafay (C) and Shahawar Matin Siraj (R) appear August 2004 in Federal District Court in New York, before Magistrate Kiyo Matsumoto (R rear) during an arraignment on charges related to an alleged plot to bomb a New York City subway station. Standing at left are Assistant US attorneys John Nathanson (L) and Kelly Currie (2nd L). (AFP/Getty Images/File) A Pakistani man was convicted of planning to blow up a New York subway station ahead of the Republican National Convention held before the...

NEW YORK — A man was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday for conspiring to blow up a busy Manhattan subway station. James Elshafay, had pleaded guilty and testified against the mastermind of the plot, Shahawar Matin Siraj, at a trial last year in federal court in Brooklyn. Elshafay, the son of an Egyptian father and Irish mother, testified that after meeting Siraj at an Islamic bookstore, they hatched an initial scheme — later abandoned — to blow up the four bridges connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn and New Jersey. He also told jurors at Siraj's trial that...

A rookie police officer, with only weeks on the job, crossed paths with the would-be terrorist who is charged with plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Beginning in November 2002, the undercover officer made visits to an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and said he listened to the store clerk, Shahawar Matin Siraj, 23, predict further attacks on New York City, possibly on Wall Street. The officer, who testified yesterday at Mr. Siraj's trial in Brooklyn federal court under a pseudonym, Kamil Pasha, retold of conversations that suggest that Mr. Siraj drew satisfaction from tragedies ranging from...

2 NAILED IN HERALD SQ. SUBWAY BLAST PLOT August 28, 2004 -- The convention will be held at Madison Square Garden, located over Penn Station and a block west of the Herald Square subway station. The busy station serves hundreds of thousands of daily riders on the B, D, F, V, N, Q, R and W lines. Sources said the threat was taken so seriously by officials that it was mentioned this week in a Department of Homeland Security memo. The plot unraveled when the NYPD's Intelligence Division began conducting surveillance earlier this year on a group of Muslim...

Men wanted to blow up bomb in 34th Street/Herald Square station. Men of Middle-Eastern descent. No ties to convention. More to follow...