The case of Faisal Shahzad

Providing an accurate e-mail address to the seller of a vehicle you intend to use as a murder weapon is the sort of mistake that might get a person’s membership card pulled down at the terrorist union hall. No doubt Faisal Shahzad, the man arrested in the Times Square car bomb case, is having a bad day. If not for that e-mail address, Shahzad might already have stepped off an airplane in Karachi, ready to melt away into Pakistan.

Last week, before the Times Square incident, I was talking with a former U.S. intelligence officer who worked extensively on jihadi cases during several overseas tours. He said that when a singleton of Shahzad’s profile—especially a U.S. citizen—turns up in a place like Peshawar, local jihadi groups are much more likely to assess him as a probable U.S. spy than as a genuine volunteer. At best, the jihadi groups might conclude that a particular U.S.-originated individual’s case is uncertain. They might then encourage the person to go home and carry out an attack—without giving him any training or access to higher-up specialists that might compromise their local operations. They would see such a U.S.-based volunteer as a “freebie,” the former officer said—if he returns home to attack, great, but if he merely goes off to report back to his C.I.A. case officer, no harm done.

From The Case of Faisal Shahzad by Steve Coll Read More here

He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado — the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan, a tribal area that is a haven for militants.
On Saturday, the authorities said, Mr. Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.

From  From Suburban Father to a Terrorism Suspect by James Barron and Michael S. Schmidt in The New York Times 

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The dramatic arrest of Faisal Shahzad in connection with the Times Square bomb plot has shocked people who know the family here. Villagers of Mohib Banda in Pabbi, Nowshera, said that members of Shahzad’s family believed he had been implicated in a false case. “They are a well-respected family. They are apolitical,” a family friend said.
“I know Shahzad’s family very well. They are highly respected in the entire village and adjoining areas,” said Advocate Kifayatullah Khan, a former member of the provincial bar council.
He said the family believed that Shahzad had been framed. “The entire family is highly educated and enlightened. The villagers don’t believe that Shahzad could act in such a manner,” he said.

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The 30-year-old naturalised American spent much of the last decade in the United States, where he has been charged on five counts of terrorism, including attempted use of a “weapon of mass destruction” to kill people in New York.
Villagers say the son of a retired air force officer grew up in a comfortable and respected middle-class family, was privately educated and went to university with other sons of the elite in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
US media reports say Shahzad had worked as a financial analyst in Connecticut, where he lived before his house was repossessed last year because of debt problems.
In the 1980s, when Shahzad was a child, Peshawar was a staging post for the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a place frequented by Osama bin Laden and swollen by a morass of two million Afghan refugees.

From Faisal Shahzad: ‘modern boy’ from liberal Pakistani village in DAWN 

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Then there has been the delay in Shahzad’s court arraignment. He was expected to appear before a judge on Tuesday to enter a plea, but the case was postponed without any explanation by the authorities. With the best will in the world, given the torture revelations from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, it is impossible not to wonder if the suspect may have been mistreated during his questioning and that the authorities did not want him to appear in court showing his wounds. The New York Police Department may be outraged by such suspicions, but that is the price that America now has to pay because of its behavior in the recent past.

From The Plot thickens: Editorial in Arab News
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