Times Square bomber ‘hoped to kill many people’

The man who tried to plant a car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 this year, Faisal Shahzad, pleaded guilty yesterday to all 10 charges against him, admitting that he had been taught how to build the device by the Taliban during a visit to Pakistan.

When he walked away from his Nissan Pathfinder that Saturday evening, having set the device to explode in five minutes, he hoped it would kill and injure many passers-by. The area was busy with tourists and Broadway theatre-goers.

The fact that the fertiliser bomb did not go off remained a puzzle. "I don't know the reason why," Shahzad told the judge. "I was waiting to hear a sound, but I couldn't hear any sound, so I thought it probably didn't go off. So I just walked to the Grand Central and went home."

Shahzad, who was arrested two days later boarding a flight at JFK to Dubai, told Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum he was "part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations and the Muslim people".

"I want to plead guilty, and I'm going to plead guilty 100 times over," he said, "because until the hour the US pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking US, and I plead guilty to that."

Shahzad claimed to have received his training from Tehrik-i-Taliban, the umbrella organisation for the Taliban in Pakistan. But it was his own choice to target Times Square.

"Were there a lot of people in the street?" Judge Cedarbaum asked.

"Yes," Shahzad replied. "Obviously the time, it was evening, and obviously it was a Saturday, so that's the time I chose."

"You wanted to injure a lot of people?" Cedarbaum asked.

Yes, he replied. He wanted to injure people or kill people.

"One has to understand where I'm coming from," he told Judge Cedarbaum. He considered himself "a Muslim soldier," and that the United States and Nato forces had attacked Muslim lands.

Cedarbaum interjected: "But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?"

Shahzad: "Well, the people select the government; we consider them all the same."

"Including the children?" the judge asked.

"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq," Shahzad replied, "they don't see children; they don't see anybody. They kill women, children. They kill everybody. It's a war."

Shahzad, who became an American citizen a year ago, said his wife and two children had gone to live with his parents in Pakistan. He is now back in jail, awaiting his next court appearance on October 5 when he faces multiple life sentences. ·