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Second man pleads guilty in plot to bomb NY subway
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A second Afghan-born man pleaded guilty on Friday to plotting to bomb New York's subways in what U.S. authorities have called the most serious threat to the city since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Taxi driver Zarein Ahmedzay pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiring to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Ahmedzay, 25, is a former U.S. high school classmate of Najibullah Zazi, who admitted this year that he had received weapons and training from al Qaeda and plotted a suicide bomb attack on the city's subways.
Prosecutors said the men planned to carry out the bombing during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, between August 22 and September 20 last year, but they abandoned the plot once they knew they were being investigated.
Zazi, who moved to the New York borough of Queens from Afghanistan as a teenager, was due to be sentenced in June. Ahmedzay's sentencing is set for July. Both men face life in prison.
Ahmedzay, who is a U.S. citizen, admitted that he traveled to Pakistan in 2008 with Zazi, where they were trained in bomb-making by al Qaeda.
"I was a New York City taxi driver and I knew the city very well. The most important thing was to hit well-known structures and maximize the number of casualties," Ahmedzay told Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven Gold.
"I personally believed that conducting an operation in the United States would be the best way to end the wars," he said.
2005 LONDON BOMBING CITED
Prosecutors said that while in Pakistan the pair met with Saleh al-Somali, head of international operations for al Qaeda, and Rashid Rauf, a British al Qaeda militant suspected of being the ringleader of a 2006 plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Knox has said al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan directed the men to carry out an attack similar to the 2005 London transit bombings that killed more than 50 people.
A third man, Adis Medunjanin, of Bosnian origin, who was also a classmate of Zazi and Ahmedzay, has pleaded not guilty. Local media have reported that a fourth unidentified suspect has been arrested in Pakistan.
"The facts disclosed today add chilling details to what we know was a deadly plot hatched by al Qaeda leaders overseas to kill scores of Americans in the New York City subway system in September 2009," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.
Last week Muslim cleric Ahmad Afzali, 39, was ordered to leave the United States after admitting he lied to the FBI in connection with the investigation into the subway plot.
Afzali was accused of tipping off Zazi that he was under investigation, forcing authorities to bring Zazi in for questioning sooner than they had planned. Zazi attended a mosque led by Afzali.
(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Xavier Briand)
