Times Sq Bomber Gets Life, Warns Of New Attacks
NEW YORK (CBS 2/ WCBS 880/1010 WINS/AP) -- He tried to unleash an historical attack on the crossroads of the world, and now he's going to prison for the rest of his life. Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born Connecticut man who tried to detonate a bomb in the heart of Times Square on May 1, was sentenced Tuesday.
"Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun," 31-year-old Faisal Shahzad told a federal judge. "Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow."
LISTEN: WCBS 880's Peter Haskell with the U.S. Attorney
LISTEN: WCBS 880's Irene Cornell on the sentencing
LISTEN: 1010 WINS' Juliet Papa with comments from the judge
His punishment for building the propane-and-gasoline bomb and driving it into the heart of the city in an SUV last May was a foregone conclusion, since the charges to which he pleaded guilty carried a mandatory life sentence, which under federal rules will keep him behind bars until he dies.
But the former budget analyst from Connecticut used the courtroom appearance to rail against the U.S., saying the country will continue to pay for occupying Muslim countries.
"We are only Muslims ... but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you," he told U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum.
Shahzad -- brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, and wearing a long beard and white skullcap -- had instructed his attorney not to speak, and Cedarbaum told prosecutors she didn't need to hear from them.
That left the two free to spar over his reasoning for giving up his comfortable life in America to train in Pakistan and carry out an attack authorities say could have killed an untold number of pedestrians.
CBS 2's Don Dahler reported that after Cedarbaum told Shahzad he was a young man and would have a long time in prison to reflect on what he had done, he said he would have only as long as Allah wanted him to, but that non-believers would suffer forever.
"You appear to be someone who was capable of education and I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people," Cedarbaum said.
Shahzad responded that the "Quran gives us the right to defend. And that's all I'm doing."
The judge cut him off at one point to ask if he had sworn allegiance to the U.S. when he became a citizen last year.
"I did swear, but I did not mean it," Shahzad said.
In his address to the court, he said Osama bin Laden "will be known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade" -- a reference to the Muslim hero of the Crusades. He also said: "If I'm given 1,000 lives, I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah."
Shahzad smirked when the judge imposed the sentence. Asked if he had any final words, he said, "I'm happy with the deal that God has given me."
Afterward, the head of the FBI's New York office, Janice K. Fedarcyk, cited evidence that Shahzad hoped to strike more than once.
"Shahzad built a mobile weapon of mass destruction and hoped and intended that it would kill large numbers of innocent people and planned to do it again two weeks later," Fedarcyk said in a statement. "The sentence imposed today means Shahzad will never pose that threat again."
Calling himself a Muslim soldier, Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts. He said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.
For greatest impact, he chose a crowded a section of Times Square by studying an online streaming video of the so-called Crossroads of the World, prosecutors said.
On May 1, he lit the fuse of his crude bomb packed in a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, then walked away, pausing to listen for the explosion that never came, court papers said. A street vendor spotted smoke coming from the SUV and alerted police, who quickly cleared the area.
The bomb attempt set off an intense investigation that culminated two days later with investigators plucking Shahzad off a Dubai-bound plane at a New York airport.
Prosecutors introduced a dramatic videotape of an FBI-staged explosion in a Pennsylvania field that they said demonstrated how deadly Shahzad's bomb could have been.
The FBI's car bomb -- a 1993 Pathfinder fitted with 250 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel, three 25-pound propane tanks and two five-gallon gasoline canisters -- blew up with a force that ripped the sport utility vehicle in half.
The explosion caused a giant fireball that overturned and shredded four other cars parked nearby, obliterated about a dozen dummies and shot fiery debris hundreds of feet in all directions.
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