Faisal Shahzad: The Broadway Bomber

If you wanted to do a lot of damage with a well-rigged car bomb, the junction of West 45th Street and Broadway in midtown Manhattan, where Times Square narrows into an asphalt bottleneck, would be the place to pick. If the bomb planted in a green 1993 Nissan Pathfinder SUV on the evening of May 1 had exploded, here’s what would have happened, according to retired New York police department bomb-squad detective Kevin Barry. The car would have turned into a “boiling liquid explosive.” The propane tanks that the bomb comprised would have overheated and ignited into “huge blowtorches” that could have been ejected from the vehicle. The explosion, lasting only a few seconds, would have created a thermal ball wide enough to swallow up most of the intersection. A blast wave would have rocketed out in all directions at speeds of 12,000 to 14,000 ft. per sec. (3,700 to 4,300 m per sec.); hitting the surrounding buildings, the wave would have bounced off and kept going, as much as nine times faster than before. Anyone standing within 1,400 ft. (430 m) — about five city blocks — of the explosion would have been at risk of being hit by shrapnel and millions of shards of flying glass. The many who died would not die prettily. A TIME reporter familiar with the ravages of car bombs in Baghdad describes how victims appeared to be naked because a fireball melted their clothing onto the surface of their skin.

Such horrors did not come to New York for what you might call a New York reason. Amid all the bumping and crowding and hustling that makes Times Square what it is hides a resident network of people who watch one another’s backs. On one corner, Lance Orton sells T-shirts at his stall; across the street is fellow Vietnam vet Duane Jackson, a handbag and scarf vendor. Rallis Gialaboukis has his hot-dog cart next to Jackson. And then there’s Bullet, the homeless guy who darts from stall to stall, chatting everyone up. Their collective alarms went off when smoke started coming out of the Pathfinder, left with its engine running in front of a phone booth, already conspicuous because it was illegally parked in a bus lane. The cops were called in; the area was evacuated. And the city that never sleeps had one more reason to thank its street-level heroes who always seem to stay wide awake.

(See pictures of Faisal Shahzad.)

In the immediate aftermath, there was a reasonable desire to concentrate on the amateurish nature of the bomb attempt allegedly carried out by Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. A gun locker inside the SUV, for example, contained fertilizer that was incapable of exploding. But skill is one thing, intentions another. Given the mayhem that could have resulted from his actions, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Shahzad’s aims were consistent with those of the global jihadi movement. The bomb in Times Square, it looks pretty clear, was not the work of some addlebrained nut job. It was terrorism: an attempt, for political reasons, to kill Americans. Lots of them.

Combating terrorism demands the highest skills of law-enforcement agencies, and in the case of the Times Square bomber, those agencies did their job. Less than 54 hours after the heroes of 45th Street had seen something and said something to the police, Shahzad was taken into custody. The SUV had a decoy license plate, and its vehicle identification number (VIN), usually on the dashboard, had been removed. But the NYPD found the VIN on another part of the vehicle. Investigators quickly established that the Pathfinder had been bought for $1,300 in cash and found the seller who had posted an ad for it online. The details of the sale led to a disposable cell phone allegedly used by Shahzad to call a store in Pennsylvania that sold fireworks similar to the ones found in the SUV.

(See pictures of the car bomb’s discovery in Times Square.)

With his identity established, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency put Shahzad’s name on the no-fly list Monday afternoon, May 3. Still, he nearly got away. The FBI apparently lost track of him that same day. By that night, Shahzad was driving to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, using a cell phone to order a ticket to Dubai on Emirates airlines, which had not yet noted the updated no-fly list. He boarded Emirates Flight 201, but before it could leave the gate, just after midnight, it was stopped, and agents entered to take Shahzad into custody. His Isuzu was found in an airport parking lot; it contained a gun. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder went on TV at 1:30 a.m. to announce the arrest.

In another press conference, Holder said Shahzad was cooperating with authorities and had admitted to driving the Pathfinder into Times Square and trying to detonate it. The official complaint filed in the Southern District of New York charged Shahzad with several counts of attempting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. It also said Shahzad had confessed to receiving bombmaking training in Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s tribal regions along its frontier border with Afghanistan.

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Read “Times Square Bomb Arrest Raises U.S. Security Questions.”

The itinerary of Shahzad’s life opened him to a host of potentially dangerous influences. Government sources in Pakistan say Faisal Shahzad was born in 1979 near Peshawar, the capital of the region where Islamabad has waged a ferocious war with the local version of the Taliban. Indeed, shortly after the incident in Times Square, Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed it was behind the plot — a boast Pakistani intelligence sources consider bluster. Islamabad appeared more concerned with contacts Shahzad may have had when he lived in Karachi, Pakistan’s dangerous port city, among them Jaish-e-Muhammad, a militant organization that played a role in the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group accused of staging the 2008 siege of Mumbai. Both groups are deeply involved in the fate of Kashmir, a region contested by Pakistan and India.

Yet for all the links to his troubled homeland, Shahzad’s journey could have been that of any other immigrant in search of the American Dream. Shahzad received a student visa to the U.S. in December 1998 and, shortly after, arrived to get a computer-science degree at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He then got an M.B.A. and worked for a financial company in nearby Stamford. Shahzad and his wife Huma, an American citizen, bought a one-family house for $273,000 in Shelton, Conn., an almost picture-book American suburb with white picket fences, colonials with front porches, kids trotting off to school buses and golden retrievers prancing on perfectly trimmed front yards. One neighbor, Helen Cavallaro, remembers how Shahzad’s wife would wear “traditional clothes” but says that “didn’t bother us at all.” In April 2009, Shahzad became an American citizen.

(Read “Attempted Bombing Was Poorly Plotted, Experts Say.”)

Then something happened. The couple apparently could not keep up with mortgage payments and other loans. In June, Shahzad quit his job, and their house went into foreclosure. The couple, who had two children, moved to Sheridan Street in Bridgeport, a neighborhood surrounded by factories and occupied, as Bridgeport mayor Bill Finch says, by “working-class, working-poor people.” The homes have metal, not picket, fences; several have graffiti sprayed on them. People keep to themselves. Even after his arrest, barely any of his neighbors could remember who Shahzad was.

Last summer, Shahzad traveled to Pakistan with his wife and children. There, the U.S. government says, he attended a militant training camp. His family apparently remained in Pakistan after he flew back to the U.S. in February. The record of his return on a one-way ticket provides the only indication that American officials were suspicious of Shahzad’s activities: he was pulled aside at the airport for secondary screening and made to answer questions about where he had been while abroad. Representative Jane Harman, chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, said information gathered then was “critical” and eventually was “used in his arrest.” But it was not conclusive enough to keep him from re-entering the U.S. and, a little more than two months later, carrying out his plot.

(Read “The Times Square Suspect’s Pakistan Connection.”)

Inept as it turned out to be, Shahzad’s assault on Times Square illustrates a downside of the U.S. war on terrorism. While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and drones in Pakistan — have killed many would-be terrorists, those who continue to operate do so more independently. “These are primarily one-offs,” says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., describing recent attacks in the U.S., including the one by U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan in Fort Hood, Texas, and the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a flight as it approached Detroit in December 2009. “That means there’s no warning.”

Nevertheless, law enforcement recently has managed to foil some of these individual actors, including the plot by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant to the U.S., to blow up New York City subway lines; Zazi was arrested in September 2009. There were also FBI stings in Texas and Illinois last year that led to the arrests of men who believed themselves part of al-Qaeda operations. “We haven’t bent their determination one bit, but these are smaller, lower-quality efforts,” says Jenkins. “We have managed to break up their capability to conduct large-scale, centrally directed operations.” By using so-called lone wolves, says Jenkins, terrorist groups lose the “opportunity to learn lessons and refine their skills.” Of the current crop of terrorists uncovered in the U.S., he says, “Clearly, there’s a quality-control problem.”

Yet that’s no more than a small mercy. New York came desperately close on May 1 to suffering an attack that could easily have claimed the lives of scores of people. As images of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center recede into memory, New Yorkers could be forgiven for thinking — and hoping — that the long war against extremist Islamic terrorism is somehow drawing to a close. They have just relearned an old lesson: it’s not.

—Reported by Christina Crapanzano/Bridgeport, Omar Waraich and Rania Abouzeid/Islamabad, Laura Fitzpatrick and Bobby Ghosh/New York and Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington

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