It wouldn’t have been the first time a militant Muslim fueled by hatred of America had designs on detonating explosives in New York’s City’s busy Times Square area. That dubious distinction belongs to Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen who is currently serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison.
Luckily, we’ll never know if the second attempt would have succeeded.
That is because the mastermind behind it, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is dead, and his surviving partner-brother, Dzhokhar, is in the hospital recovering from injuries under careful watch of law enforcement.
According to NBC News, city officials were apprised of the plot Wednesday night by the FBI. Police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that the brothers’ decision was spontaneous and came after they carjacked an SUV. The plan had to be scrapped when they realized the SUV was low on gas.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg advised that the attackers would have encountered a heavy police presence but added:
We don’t know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists if they had arrived here from Boston. We’re just thankful that we didn’t have to find out the answer.
Kelly noted that police knew of two visits by the younger Tsarnaev brother to New York last year — once on or before April 18, and once in November. Whether those visits were related to any plot against the city has not been ascertained.
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