An admitted al-Qaida recruit testified that he and two friends were determined to “weaken America” by strapping on suicide bombs and attacking New York City subways around the eighth anniversary of 9/11, but now hopes for redemption. Click below to read the rest of the story.
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“I believe my crimes are very bad,” Najibullah Zazi said on cross-examination. “If God gave me a second chance, I would appreciate it and will be a very good human being.”
Earlier, Zazi told a federal jury at his alleged accomplice’s trial that he slipped detonator ingredients into the city on Sept. 10, 2009, after the chemicals extracted from beauty supplies passed a test run.
Using code words, he then frantically emailed one of his al-Qaida handlers to get the exact formula for building homemade bombs to go with detonators.
“The marriage is ready,” Zazi wrote — signaling that he and two of his radicalized former high school classmates from Queens were ready to die as martyrs.
Zazi said the plot _ financed in part by $50,000 in credit card charges he never intended by to pay back — was abandoned after he noticed that everywhere he drove in New York, a car followed.
“I think law enforcement is on us,” he recalled telling one of his co-conspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay. Later, he said he told the third man, Adis Medunjanin, in a text message, “We are done.”
The 26-year-old Zazi testified for a second day at the trial of Medunjanin in federal court in Brooklyn. He was to return to the witness stand on Thursday for more cross-examination.
Prosecutors say that Zazi, Medunjanin and Ahmedzay — after growing upset over the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and receiving terror training at an al-Qaida compound in Pakistan — together hatched what authorities have described as one of the most serious terror plots since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Medunjanin, 27, a Bosnian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, providing material support to a terrorist organization and other charges.
Medunjanin has denied he was ever part of an al-Qaida operation. His lawyers have sought to show that — unlike Zazi and Ahmedzay — he had no direct involvement in the efforts to assemble bombs.
