NY subway bomb plotter gets 30 years in prison
Source: Reuters
(Adds quotes, details and byline) By Matthew Verrinder NEW YORK, Jan 8 (Reuters) - A Pakistani immigrant convicted of plotting to set off a bomb in New York City's Herald Square subway station was sentenced on Monday to 30 years in prison. A jury found Shahawar Matin Siraj guilty in May of scheming to blow up the midtown Manhattan station, below a thriving shopping district that includes Macy's department store and just a block from the Empire State Building. "The crimes committed here had the potential, if not thwarted, to wreak havoc," said U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon in Brooklyn. Khurrum Wahid, one of Siraj's lawyers, said the 24-year-old will have to serve 85 percent of his 30-year sentence before being deported to Pakistan. "The conspiracy did happen and I take the responsibility," Siraj told the court. "I wish I could take these words back but it cannot happen." Prosecutors argued in the five-week trial that Siraj had the will to carry out the plot because of his extremist views. The prosecution case was strengthened by the testimony of a co-conspirator who pleaded guilty and an undercover police officer who said Siraj openly supported al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Lawyers for Siraj, who was never affiliated with any key extremist groups, argued he was entrapped by a police informant, Egyptian Osama Eldawoody, who misused his surveillance powers. Eldawoody, 50, met Siraj in Brooklyn in 2003 in an Islamic bookstore while on a contract job infiltrating mosques for the New York Police Department. A year later, Eldawoody secretly recorded conversations with Siraj in which he spoke about bombing the Herald Square station and several New York City bridges, and said he was "ready for jihad," according to the criminal complaint. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the city's police had lobbied for increased surveillance of mosques, believing they sheltered Islamist militants. A 2003 decision by a federal judge granted the city's police expanded surveillance powers. "The Siraj sentence is a milestone in the safeguarding of New York City," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement. "Our detectives uncovered a murderous plot in its infancy and stopped it before lives were lost."
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