An Al Qaeda wannabe was busted Wednesday on charges he set out to blow up the Federal Reserve in Lower Manhattan with a bogus 1,000-pound bomb he got from an undercover FBI agent, officials said.
Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, of Jamaica, Queens, boasted that he wanted to “destroy America,” federal authorities said.
Nafis drove the bomb in a van and parked it in front of the Federal Reserve on Liberty St., then went to a nearby hotel where he recorded a video taking responsiblity for the terrorist attack he was about to commit, officials said.
FBI agents arrested him at the hotel after he attempted to detonate the bomb he thought was real with a cellphone, a law enforcement source said.
Mary Galligan, the FBI’s acting assistant director in New York, said Nafis had no qualms about killing or maiming “untold numbers of innocent bystanders.”
“The defendant faces appropriately severe consequences,” Galligan said.
She insisted the public was never at risk because the explosives he had accumulated with the help of an undercover FBI agent and an FBI source posing as his accomplices were inert.
But Nafis apparently believed was on a mass killing mission up to the point he tried to set off the bomb.
“Nafis devised this attack plan himself and came to the United States for the purpose of carrying out such an attack,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Lisa Monaco.
In a written statement claiming responsiblity, Nafis, who arrived in the United States in January, quoted “our beloved Sheikh Osama Bin Laden,” mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that happened three blocks from the Federal Reserve.
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