Three people—including a Filipino—have been charged with involvement in planned jihadist attacks on targets including New York’s subway and Times Square, in 2016.
But an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent helped thwart the plot of Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, Talha Haroon, and Russel Salic of the Philippines.
The attacks were supposed to be carried out in the name of the Islamic State group during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, American state prosecutors said in a statement on Friday.
Bahnasawy, a 19-year-old Canadian who purchased bombmaking materials and was arrested after traveling to the US, has pled guilty to “terrorism offenses,” they said.
Haroon, a 19-year-old American citizen living in Pakistan who allegedly planned to take part in the attacks; and Filipino Salic, 37, who allegedly provided funds for the operation; have been arrested abroad, and their extradition to the US is pending.
In the Philippines, state prosecutors said Salic, a doctor, had links to the local terrorist group Maute, which has pledged allegiance to IS and is responsible for attacking Marawi in May.
Salic is facing murder and kidnapping charges in connection with the abduction of four Iligan residents and the beheading of two others in April 2016.
He has been placed under the custody of the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation.
Participation
“El Bahnasawy and Haroon identified multiple locations and events in and around New York City as targets of the planned attacks, including the New York City subway system, Times Square and certain concert venues,” the American prosecutors said.
The 2015 attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris and another on the metro in Belgium the following year served as inspiration for the planned killings in New York.
Those attacks were both claimed by IS, a brutal militant group that seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and has inspired a series of deadly attacks abroad.
El Bahnasawy sent the FBI agent, who was posing as an IS supporter and communicated with the three plotters, an image of Times Square, saying that “we seriously need a car bomb” to attack it and that he wanted to “shoot up concerts cuz they kill a lot of people.”
Haroon, meanwhile, told the agent that the subway would make a “perfect” target, and that suicide vests could be detonated after the attackers expended their ammunition.
Salic also began communicating with the FBI agent, eventually sending “approximately $423” to fund the attacks and promising to send more, according to the American prosecutors.
New York was the target of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and led the US to launch an open-ended “war on terror” that included invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and military operations in a number of other countries.
These operations led, directly and indirectly, to tens of thousands of deaths, and cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars.
The most recent attack in New York occurred in September 2016, when a pressure cooker bomb exploded in the Chelsea neighborhood, wounding 29 people. (Eagle News Service, Agence France Presse)
