On Sept. He was tailed by FBI agents. Zazi and his two co-conspirators, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, rode the subway and developed plans to blow up backpack bombs near the busy Grand Central and Times Square stations in Manhattan.
A laptop in the car held notes on making bombs in his handwriting. Wary of discovery, Zazi threw away his bombmaking materials and flew back to Denver. He was arrested in Colorado on Sept. Zazi's two co-conspirators are both in federal prison. Ahmedzay pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and received a sentence of 10 years. Medunjanin was found guilty on terrorism charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. Zazi's father received a four and a half year sentence for destroying evidence and lying to investigators.
Imam Ahmad Afzali was charged with tipping Zazi off to government surveillance but negotiated a plea deal in which he left the U. In February , Zazi pleaded guilty to three counts — material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, and conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country — and agreed to cooperate with authorities.
The year sentence means Zazi could be released from prison "within days," said Stampur. Zazi has been in custody for nearly a decade. Zazi spent his teenage years and young adulthood living in Queens. Al Qaeda recruited him and two of his best friends to carry out a "martyrdom operation" on U. The mission called for rush-hour suicide bombings on packed subway lines, timed to occur during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and on the eighth anniversary of the Sept.
Zazi's cooperation included meeting with the government "more than times, viewing hundreds of photographs and providing information that assisted law enforcement officials in a number of different investigations," prosecutors said in a court filing.
Zazi testified at the trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani national convicted of leading an al Qaeda plot to bomb a shopping mall in Manchester, England, and against one of his co-conspirators in the thwarted subway plot, Adis Medunjanin, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Attorney Douglas M. Pravda wrote in the court filing. In a letter to the judge that was unsealed late Thursday, Zazi tells Dearie that he was radicallized by two friends who introduced him to the preaching of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American-turned-extremist-Islamic preacher and senior leader al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, AQAP, who was killed in American drone strikes in the Middle East in Al-Awlaki's preaching was featured in numerous al-Qaeda propaganda videos aimed at radicalizing young Muslims around the world.
Zazi said in the letter that he was introduced to "the teachings of Anwar Al-Awlaki on the internet. Zazi goes on to say that "Looking back, I can now see how gullible I was, actually living in an imaginary world. They take historical facts and contort them to their agenda, to motivate people to their will. My lack of education and the reverence surrounding Awlaki, an Islamic scholar, was enough to cause me to believe.
But now I battle back with knowledge, I read diverse books on general knowledge and am constantly getting a deeper understanding of Islam, reading many different texts. While incarcerated, Zazi said in the letter that he had earned a General Educational Developmment diploma, or GED, the general equivalent of a high school diploma.
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