A second chance. The failed plans for an attack on the subway in New York.
US District Court Judge Raymond Dearie sat behind the raised judge’s table in the Eastern District of New York. The 74-year-old former prosecutor looked down at the case file before him and then raised his gaze, which he directed at a dark-haired, South Asian-looking man in his early 30s. So said the judge
“Is this the same Mr Zazi I saw many years ago?”
As prosecutors and defence attorneys subsequently described how Najibullah Zazi had transformed from a radicalised terrorist with al-Qaida ties to a key witness who had been extraordinarily cooperative with US investigators, the judge almost rhetorically answered his own questions.
“All indications are, it is not”
The story of Najibullah Zazi is the story that terrorist attacks, fortunately, did not always succeed. But it is also a perhaps relatively rare story of a radicalised person who later sincerely regretted his actions and contributed to putting other terrorists behind bars. Many terrorists are willing to die for their cause, even if they fail to carry out their terrible plans. So although this is the story of an attack that was fortunately prevented in time, it also gives an insight into how a radicalisation process can take place, described and reflected on by the perpetrator himself.
Early Life of Najibullah Zazi
“Coming to America was the greatest moment of my life”.
Najibullah Zazi had been in prison for 10 years after pleading guilty in 2010 to his involvement in the planning and failed execution of perhaps the most significant attack in the United States since September 11th, 2001. Now he was facing the judge, who had to decide on the length of his sentence. In an undated letter to the judge, he described his radicalisation and his journey back to a life free of hate and radicalisation. He had been seduced online by threats that “the US was on a mission to destroy all of Islam” and that “if he did not act to protect Islam, he would be doomed forever in the afterlife”. He also wrote that he had changed his attitude by acquiring a GED in prison, a form of American high school education, and a new understanding of Islam.
“The uneducated are perfect targets for the unscrupulous,” the letter said.
But who was this Najibullah Zazi, who had to pay such expensive tuition fees for an educational journey that had almost cost him and many innocent civilians their lives?
Najibullah Zazi was born on August 10th 1985, in a village in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and grew up with his two sisters and two brothers. When he was 7 years old, in 1992, his family moved to Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, where they lived as Afghan refugees. Having lived in Pakistan for 7 years, he and his family left in 1999 and emigrated to New York City in the USA. Najibullah Zazi was then 14 years old. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Flushing neighbourhood of the Queens section of the city, a community with many ethnic minorities. Mohammed Wali Zazi, Najibullah’s Zazi’s father, obtained American citizenship and found work as a taxi driver.
As teenagers, they lived in the same apartment complex and came in the same maybe as Imam Saifur Rahman Halimi. Halimi advocated global jihad and was a spokesman for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord designated an international terrorist by the United States in 2003. Hekmatyar was part of the Northern Alliance, the last coalition of various clans and factions in Afghanistan that fought the Taliban during the Afghan civil war from 1992 to 1996. But it was a power struggle because Hekmatyar was known to be as radical and conservative in his interpretation of Islam as the Taliban. At one point, the Zazi family left the mosque with Halimi, Hekmatyar’s spokesman, which I interpret as sharing his radical views. In addition, Najibullah Zazi also liked to listen to Zakir Naik, an Indian Muslim televangelist whose interpretation of Islam is closest to the Salafist school practised, for example, in Saudi Arabia. Among other things, Naik has spoken positively about Islamic terror, violence against women, intolerance towards other religions, and homosexuality and has expressed similar extreme Islamist attitudes. So it was under this kind of extremist Islamic influence that Najibullah Zazi grew up.
Najibullah Zazi struggled as a student at Flushing High School in Queens and eventually left early. Aged 21, he travelled to Pakistan in 2006 and married his 19-year-old cousin in an arranged marriage. He claimed that several trips he made to Pakistan between 2006 and 2008 were to visit his wife. Among other things, they had two children, whom he planned to move to the United States.
There is much evidence, however, that Najibullah Zazi was doing other and much more severe things in Pakistan during that period than just pleasant family visits. On August 28th, 2008, just over a year before the failed attack was supposed to take place, he flew with his two high school friends, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, to Peshawar, Pakistan, the city where he and his family lived, through his early childhood.
Friend Adis Medunjanin, a Bosnian immigrant who came to the US in 1994, became a US citizen in 2002 and lived in Flushing, Queens. He played on his high school football team and graduated from Queens College with a degree in economics in June 2009. He then worked as a building manager for a property management company. The other comrade, Zarein Ahmedzay, was born in Afghanistan and worked as a taxi driver in New York. Like his two friends, he lived in Flushing, Queens, and before the trips to Pakistan, had unsuccessfully tried to be accepted into the city’s fire brigade in 2007. So it was this trio, Zazi, Medunjanin and Ahmedzay, who had travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan, where they were seriously radicalised.
We stop the story for a moment and zoom in on the town and the area it is located in, as it is pretty central to the story. Peshawar is the largest city in what was then called Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, abbreviated as FATA. FATA was a semi-autonomous tribal area administered by Pakistan’s central government and is today part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The American think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies describes FATA as:
While Najibullah, his two companions and other potential terrorists were in Peshawar, they were recruited by the local al-Qaeda group and taken to a training camp in Waziristan, where they received training in several weapons. Waziristan was also part of the previously mentioned FATA area, which covers about 11,585 square kilometres and is populated by ethnic Pashtuns. This eastern Iranian ethnic group resides primarily in southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the United States declared its so-called “war on terror” and invaded Afghanistan between October and December 2001. This caused the then regime in Afghanistan, known as the infamous Taliban, to flee. Many settled in Pakistan, joining Al-Qaida or one of the many local or regional Islamist groups. From here, they could plan and arrange attacks on US forces in Afghanistan as well as attacks on the Pakistani army.
So in Waziristan in 2008, a year before the failed attack, Najibullah Zazi and his fellow travellers were radicalised and received training in planning and carrying out a terrorist attack. At the training camp, they studied the Salafist interpretation of Islam, learned to operate weapons and received guidance on potential targets.
“During my training, I had discussion with Al Qaeda ... leaders, including target locations, such as New York City subways,”
Najibullah Zazi later told the trial. He described how he often argued with his friend, Adis Medunjanin, and scolded him because of his personal and religious habits.
“I probably hurt his feelings during the trip by accusing him of not doing things right,” Najibullah continued.
“I criticized Medunjanin for matters such as drinking tea out of a soda bottle or not eating his food in the regional manner.”
After several months of training, Al-Qaeda leaders asked the three friends to return to the United States and carry out a suicide bombing operation. A mission they agreed to carry out. The US prosecutor later said that Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaeda’s head of external operations, and Rashid Rauf, an al-Qaeda terrorist, ordered the attack. Both were later killed in drone strikes. After this, Zazi received further training at the camp in constructing explosives. He took lengthy notes and e-mailed them to himself to access them when he returned to the United States. Al-Qaeda leaders also discussed potential terrorist targets with Zazi, such as the New York subway. He donated money and computers to al-Qaeda before leaving Pakistan.
On January 15th 2009, approx. 8 months before the failed attack was supposed to occur, Najibullah Zazi returned to the United States. Within days of his return home, he moved to Aurora, Colorado. From around June 2009, he began looking for ingredients to make bombs. He did several Internet searches for hydrochloric acid and made acetone peroxide that he wanted to use as a detonator. During the same period, he went to New York, where he allegedly held planning meetings with his conspirators.
The plan was for him and two high school friends, Ahmedzay and Medunjanin, who had been with them on the trips to Pakistan, to carry out coordinated suicide bombings. They planned to detonate backpack bombs in New York City Subway trains near New York’s two busiest subway stations, Grand Central and Times Square in Manhattan, during rush hour. They would board in the middle of packed trains for up to 6 trains to cause maximum death and destruction. Zazi rode the subway several times to find where the bombs would go off. The explosives had to be made from the acetone, as mentioned above peroxide, called TATP or “Poor man’s explosive” because it is used by groups that do not have access to other explosives. The substance is unstable and shock-sensitive and detonates if, for example, it is hit by a hard blow or is not produced correctly. The attack was to be carried out with backpacks, similar to the attacks on trains in Madrid in 2004 and the London Underground in 2007. As a final step in his sinister plans, Najibullah Zazi went shopping for the ingredients to make the bombs.
The young beauty salon clerk at the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, smiled at the dark-haired young man standing before her. It was July 2009, and she had gradually gotten used to him coming by and shopping. In particular, he dealt in large quantities of hydrogen peroxide and acetone products that women use to clean their skin and remove nail polish. The young man explained his purchases by saying he had many girlfriends. Therefore, it did not cause much of a stir at either this or the many other beauty salons in Colorado and the surrounding area, which the young man and his three friends of the same age frequently visited.
This, in turn, was done by the American federal police and the FBI. Just a few months before, the FBI had been contacted by their British counterpart, Scotland Yard, who, as part of a counter-terrorism operation called Operation Pathway, had intercepted an e-mail from a senior al-Qaeda member in Pakistan to Najibullah Zazi. Here, Zazi was instructed on how to carry out a suicide bombing on the subway in New York City and an attack in Great Britain. This led the FBI to immediately begin extensive surveillance of Zazi and his three friends, who insisted for many months leading up to the terrorist attack. FBI agents tapped Zazi’s phone calls and, in August 2009, overheard him talking about mixing chemical substances. Officials were told to look for people with burns on their hands because they could be chemical. They were also instructed to be wary of apartments with a bad smell or many window fans, which could also indicate bomb-making.
On August 28th and September 6–7, Zazi checked into a motel suite and used the suite’s kitchenette to make the chemicals he could use in bombs. The authorities examined the kitchenette and found traces of chemicals in the ventilation. Two days later, on September 9th, 2009, Zazi began a nearly 2,000-mile drive in a rented car from Denver, Colorado, to New York City with the bomb-making materials. But right on their heels, the FBI followed. The day after he left Denver, two New York police officers asked a local imam, Afzali, who also worked as a police informant, to identify four people from photographs. The imam identified Zazi, who had been praying in his mosque, and two of the three others in the photos as his companions.
Zazi arrived in New York City on the afternoon of September 10th. That same weekend he wanted to manufacture the final components of the bomb. He was poised to carry out the most extensive attack in New York City and the United States since 9/11.
But even upon arrival in New York City, things began to go wrong for Najibullah Zazi. As he crossed the George Washington Bridge, which connects the state of New Jersey with Upper Manhattan in New York City, he was detained by Port Authority police. Acting at the request of the FBI, what he was told was a routine random drug search, and his car was searched. They found nothing remarkable, and he was allowed to go. Afzali’s lawyer later wrote to the court:
“Even though Zazi is not the brightest bulb in the terrorist chandelier, the thinly-transparent ruse of a 'random' checkpoint stop did not fool him.”
On September 11th, Imam Afzali, who had served as an informant for the FBI, called Najibullah Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi. The father subsequently told his son that the imam had been shown pictures and added.
“So, before anything else, speak with Afzali. See if you need to go to Afzali or to make ... yourself aware, hire an attorney.”
During a telephone conversation with the imam, Najibullah Zazi learned that the authorities had questioned him and his friends. Later that day, Zazi’s rental car was removed for illegal parking and was searched. Here, FBI agents found a laptop computer with an image of nine handwritten pages on how to make explosives, detonators and fuses. The FBI later claimed that the handwritten notes were in Zazi’s handwriting. In a conversation with Imam Afzali, he said he feared he was being “surveilled”, and Afzali asked if there was any “evidence” in the car, which Zazi denied. Then it finally dawned on Najibullah Zazi that he was being watched, and he and the other terrorists threw away the bomb-making materials. The next day, Saturday, September 12th, Zazi flew home to Denver, Colorado.
A few days later, Najibullah Zazi’s phone rang at his home in Denver. It was a reporter from the New York Times who had picked up that there had been an exposed attack in the making and that it was connected to Najibullah Zazi[2].
“I have nothing to do with this,”
replied Najibullah Zazi. He acknowledged that he was increasingly pointing towards him and claimed he was shocked. Najibullah Zazi told the reporter that he had contacted a lawyer and that the FBI was welcome to question him.
“I hope I will get the chance to ask them why they are following me”,
He continued. He explained to the reporter that he thought the police might suspect him because he had a beard and had rented the car, which he thought had been stolen. He had subsequently learned that the vehicle had been removed, and after complaining to the police twice, he had finally cut short his stay and flown back to his home in Colorado.
But when FBI agents searched several homes on September 14th, two days after Zazi left New York, they found his fingerprints, a bunch of AA batteries and a dozen black backpacks. Equipment that could be used in a suicide bombing. On September 16th, Zazi voluntarily appeared at one of the FBI’s offices in Denver, where he was questioned for eight hours in the presence of his lawyer. He denied knowledge of the planned attack and the nine-page handwritten document on his hard drive containing notes and images. Zazi speculated that he must have accidentally downloaded it back in August as part of a religious book he had downloaded and later deleted.
However, during subsequent interrogations on 17 and 18 September, he admitted to having received explosives and weapons training during his stays in Pakistan. This meant that on September 19th, 2009, the FBI believed they had grounds to arrest and charge Zazi.
On September 23rd, 2009, 14 days after the plot was officially revealed, Najibullah Zazi was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in another country and supplying material to support a terrorist organization. Zazi faced a possible life sentence without the possibility of parole for the first two charges and an additional sentence of 15 years for the third.
On February 22nd, 2010, Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to all charges. He admitted that he was recruited by al-Qaeda in Pakistan for a suicide attack against the United States and that his bomb target was the New York City subway system. He was supposed to receive his sentence on June 25th 2010; however, in mid-April 2010, he was moved to an undisclosed location. Zazi was now cooperating with the American authorities.
A month before, the FBI had arrested two of his high school friends, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, who had travelled with him to Pakistan in 2008. They were both accused of having received military-like training from al-Qaeda, and Zazi was to be the crown witness in that case. In the US, investigators and prosecutors often offer a so-called “plea bargain”, i.e.,. A bull deal between the prosecutor and the defence, to the person who first agrees to cooperate with the authorities. It is a way of getting an accused to name his co-conspirators and, in return, often receive a reduced sentence.
While the police executed a search warrant at Medunjanin’s apartment, he left it and tried to turn his car into a terrorist weapon and become a martyr. Moments before he slammed into the back of another car on the Whitestone Expressway and fled on foot, Medunjanin called 911, identified himself and left his message of martyrdom. Then he shouted:
“We love death more than you love your life.”
A slogan used by al-Qaeda trainers to inspire recruits to commit murder and suicide. However, he was arrested before he could do any harm. He subsequently admitted to the authorities that he had been trained with Zazi at the al-Qaeda camp in Waziristan, Pakistan. However, Medunjanin pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan and to additional charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to al-Qaeda.
On May 21st 2012, just over two years after his arrest, Medunjanin was found guilty of all charges. Half a year later, he was imprisoned for life, partly based on Zazi’s testimony. Medunjanin responded by reciting several verses from the Koran and criticising US foreign policy when asked if he had anything to say.
Zazi’s other high school friend and co-conspirator, taxi driver Ahmedzay, was charged on the same counts as his co-conspirators. He initially pleaded not guilty, but on April 23rd 2010, he changed his mind and admitted to all the circumstances. He told the court that two senior al-Qaeda leaders approached him because of his knowledge of New York and that they had said that.
“The most important thing was to hit well-known structures and maximize the number of casualties”.
On December 14th 2018, Ahmedzay was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The last two to be convicted of planning the terrorist attack were Najibullah Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, and FBI informant Imam Ahmad Wais Afzali, who was found to be playing a double game. Mohammed Zazi was convicted of destroying evidence and lying to investigators, and on February 10th, 2021, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Imam Ahmad Afzali received a conviction for lying to the FBI about warning Najibullah Zazi. As part of his deal, he avoided having to serve prison time, but in return, he had to leave the United States. He may return only if he receives special permission.
We are back in 2019, when Najibullah Zazi stood before a judge in New York City court, nearly 10 years after pleading guilty to plotting to bomb the New York City subway system. Zazi had spent the time in prison getting an education and finishing the equivalent of high school.
“I tried my best to correct my terrible mistake by cooperating with the government,”
Zazi said in court. His head was shaved, with a slight hint of the beard he once had.
“I’m not the same person,”he said.
“I find it almost hard to imagine what I was involved in in 2008 and 2009. I’m very sorry, your honor, for all the harm I have caused, and I ask for forgiveness”.
Zazi’s letter to the New York City court outlined his radicalisation and reformation. He wrote that upon emigrating from Afghanistan to the United States, he became “a big fan of all New York City sports teams” and “supported America’s declaration of war on Afghanistan” after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, in 2007, he met two men who “seduced” him with sermons from Anwar-Al-Awlaki, an extremist Islamic preacher on the Internet. Zazi wrote that they convinced him that the US was on a mission to destroy all of Islam and that “if he did not act to protect Islam, he would be doomed forever in the afterlife”. [i]
“I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the United States military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan by sacrificing my soul for the sake of saving other souls,”he said.
Almost 10 years after Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to plotting to bomb the New York City subway system, Judge Raymond Dearie, whom we met at the beginning of this episode, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison. Thus, after the prosecutors told about Zazi’s “extraordinary cooperation” with the American investigators, he had effectively served his sentence and was a free man.
The story of Najibullah Zazi and his comrades is, in many ways, one of the few stories of terrorist attacks that ended well. The sources do not report whether something went wrong in Najibullah Zazi’s life and, if so, what. But at least he fell into the clutches of the wrong people who radicalised him and convinced him that violence was the goal to strike back at the injustices they believed the US had committed against them. Funnily enough, as in all other wars, it is never the people who themselves go to the front and sacrifice their own life and limb in the attacks that convince others to become martyrs. Where Najibullah Zazi is today and if he really has regretted his previous actions - apart from the fact that they cost him 10 years in prison - history, unfortunately, does not report anything about that either. But at least he got what many terrorists and their victims never get – another chance.
US District Court Judge Raymond Dearie sat behind the raised judge’s table in the Eastern District of New York. The 74-year-old former prosecutor looked down at the case file before him and then raised his gaze, which he directed at a dark-haired, South Asian-looking man in his early 30s. So said the judge
“Is this the same Mr Zazi I saw many years ago?”
As prosecutors and defence attorneys subsequently described how Najibullah Zazi had transformed from a radicalised terrorist with al-Qaida ties to a key witness who had been extraordinarily cooperative with US investigators, the judge almost rhetorically answered his own questions.
“All indications are, it is not”
The story of Najibullah Zazi is the story that terrorist attacks, fortunately, did not always succeed. But it is also a perhaps relatively rare story of a radicalised person who later sincerely regretted his actions and contributed to putting other terrorists behind bars. Many terrorists are willing to die for their cause, even if they fail to carry out their terrible plans. So although this is the story of an attack that was fortunately prevented in time, it also gives an insight into how a radicalisation process can take place, described and reflected on by the perpetrator himself.
Early Life of Najibullah Zazi
“Coming to America was the greatest moment of my life”.
Najibullah Zazi had been in prison for 10 years after pleading guilty in 2010 to his involvement in the planning and failed execution of perhaps the most significant attack in the United States since September 11th, 2001. Now he was facing the judge, who had to decide on the length of his sentence. In an undated letter to the judge, he described his radicalisation and his journey back to a life free of hate and radicalisation. He had been seduced online by threats that “the US was on a mission to destroy all of Islam” and that “if he did not act to protect Islam, he would be doomed forever in the afterlife”. He also wrote that he had changed his attitude by acquiring a GED in prison, a form of American high school education, and a new understanding of Islam.
“The uneducated are perfect targets for the unscrupulous,” the letter said.
But who was this Najibullah Zazi, who had to pay such expensive tuition fees for an educational journey that had almost cost him and many innocent civilians their lives?
Najibullah Zazi was born on August 10th 1985, in a village in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and grew up with his two sisters and two brothers. When he was 7 years old, in 1992, his family moved to Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, where they lived as Afghan refugees. Having lived in Pakistan for 7 years, he and his family left in 1999 and emigrated to New York City in the USA. Najibullah Zazi was then 14 years old. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Flushing neighbourhood of the Queens section of the city, a community with many ethnic minorities. Mohammed Wali Zazi, Najibullah’s Zazi’s father, obtained American citizenship and found work as a taxi driver.
As teenagers, they lived in the same apartment complex and came in the same maybe as Imam Saifur Rahman Halimi. Halimi advocated global jihad and was a spokesman for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord designated an international terrorist by the United States in 2003. Hekmatyar was part of the Northern Alliance, the last coalition of various clans and factions in Afghanistan that fought the Taliban during the Afghan civil war from 1992 to 1996. But it was a power struggle because Hekmatyar was known to be as radical and conservative in his interpretation of Islam as the Taliban. At one point, the Zazi family left the mosque with Halimi, Hekmatyar’s spokesman, which I interpret as sharing his radical views. In addition, Najibullah Zazi also liked to listen to Zakir Naik, an Indian Muslim televangelist whose interpretation of Islam is closest to the Salafist school practised, for example, in Saudi Arabia. Among other things, Naik has spoken positively about Islamic terror, violence against women, intolerance towards other religions, and homosexuality and has expressed similar extreme Islamist attitudes. So it was under this kind of extremist Islamic influence that Najibullah Zazi grew up.
Najibullah Zazi struggled as a student at Flushing High School in Queens and eventually left early. Aged 21, he travelled to Pakistan in 2006 and married his 19-year-old cousin in an arranged marriage. He claimed that several trips he made to Pakistan between 2006 and 2008 were to visit his wife. Among other things, they had two children, whom he planned to move to the United States.
There is much evidence, however, that Najibullah Zazi was doing other and much more severe things in Pakistan during that period than just pleasant family visits. On August 28th, 2008, just over a year before the failed attack was supposed to take place, he flew with his two high school friends, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, to Peshawar, Pakistan, the city where he and his family lived, through his early childhood.
Friend Adis Medunjanin, a Bosnian immigrant who came to the US in 1994, became a US citizen in 2002 and lived in Flushing, Queens. He played on his high school football team and graduated from Queens College with a degree in economics in June 2009. He then worked as a building manager for a property management company. The other comrade, Zarein Ahmedzay, was born in Afghanistan and worked as a taxi driver in New York. Like his two friends, he lived in Flushing, Queens, and before the trips to Pakistan, had unsuccessfully tried to be accepted into the city’s fire brigade in 2007. So it was this trio, Zazi, Medunjanin and Ahmedzay, who had travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan, where they were seriously radicalised.
We stop the story for a moment and zoom in on the town and the area it is located in, as it is pretty central to the story. Peshawar is the largest city in what was then called Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, abbreviated as FATA. FATA was a semi-autonomous tribal area administered by Pakistan’s central government and is today part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The American think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies describes FATA as:
While Najibullah, his two companions and other potential terrorists were in Peshawar, they were recruited by the local al-Qaeda group and taken to a training camp in Waziristan, where they received training in several weapons. Waziristan was also part of the previously mentioned FATA area, which covers about 11,585 square kilometres and is populated by ethnic Pashtuns. This eastern Iranian ethnic group resides primarily in southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the United States declared its so-called “war on terror” and invaded Afghanistan between October and December 2001. This caused the then regime in Afghanistan, known as the infamous Taliban, to flee. Many settled in Pakistan, joining Al-Qaida or one of the many local or regional Islamist groups. From here, they could plan and arrange attacks on US forces in Afghanistan as well as attacks on the Pakistani army.
So in Waziristan in 2008, a year before the failed attack, Najibullah Zazi and his fellow travellers were radicalised and received training in planning and carrying out a terrorist attack. At the training camp, they studied the Salafist interpretation of Islam, learned to operate weapons and received guidance on potential targets.
“During my training, I had discussion with Al Qaeda ... leaders, including target locations, such as New York City subways,”
Najibullah Zazi later told the trial. He described how he often argued with his friend, Adis Medunjanin, and scolded him because of his personal and religious habits.
“I probably hurt his feelings during the trip by accusing him of not doing things right,” Najibullah continued.
“I criticized Medunjanin for matters such as drinking tea out of a soda bottle or not eating his food in the regional manner.”
After several months of training, Al-Qaeda leaders asked the three friends to return to the United States and carry out a suicide bombing operation. A mission they agreed to carry out. The US prosecutor later said that Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaeda’s head of external operations, and Rashid Rauf, an al-Qaeda terrorist, ordered the attack. Both were later killed in drone strikes. After this, Zazi received further training at the camp in constructing explosives. He took lengthy notes and e-mailed them to himself to access them when he returned to the United States. Al-Qaeda leaders also discussed potential terrorist targets with Zazi, such as the New York subway. He donated money and computers to al-Qaeda before leaving Pakistan.
On January 15th 2009, approx. 8 months before the failed attack was supposed to occur, Najibullah Zazi returned to the United States. Within days of his return home, he moved to Aurora, Colorado. From around June 2009, he began looking for ingredients to make bombs. He did several Internet searches for hydrochloric acid and made acetone peroxide that he wanted to use as a detonator. During the same period, he went to New York, where he allegedly held planning meetings with his conspirators.
The plan was for him and two high school friends, Ahmedzay and Medunjanin, who had been with them on the trips to Pakistan, to carry out coordinated suicide bombings. They planned to detonate backpack bombs in New York City Subway trains near New York’s two busiest subway stations, Grand Central and Times Square in Manhattan, during rush hour. They would board in the middle of packed trains for up to 6 trains to cause maximum death and destruction. Zazi rode the subway several times to find where the bombs would go off. The explosives had to be made from the acetone, as mentioned above peroxide, called TATP or “Poor man’s explosive” because it is used by groups that do not have access to other explosives. The substance is unstable and shock-sensitive and detonates if, for example, it is hit by a hard blow or is not produced correctly. The attack was to be carried out with backpacks, similar to the attacks on trains in Madrid in 2004 and the London Underground in 2007. As a final step in his sinister plans, Najibullah Zazi went shopping for the ingredients to make the bombs.
The young beauty salon clerk at the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, smiled at the dark-haired young man standing before her. It was July 2009, and she had gradually gotten used to him coming by and shopping. In particular, he dealt in large quantities of hydrogen peroxide and acetone products that women use to clean their skin and remove nail polish. The young man explained his purchases by saying he had many girlfriends. Therefore, it did not cause much of a stir at either this or the many other beauty salons in Colorado and the surrounding area, which the young man and his three friends of the same age frequently visited.
This, in turn, was done by the American federal police and the FBI. Just a few months before, the FBI had been contacted by their British counterpart, Scotland Yard, who, as part of a counter-terrorism operation called Operation Pathway, had intercepted an e-mail from a senior al-Qaeda member in Pakistan to Najibullah Zazi. Here, Zazi was instructed on how to carry out a suicide bombing on the subway in New York City and an attack in Great Britain. This led the FBI to immediately begin extensive surveillance of Zazi and his three friends, who insisted for many months leading up to the terrorist attack. FBI agents tapped Zazi’s phone calls and, in August 2009, overheard him talking about mixing chemical substances. Officials were told to look for people with burns on their hands because they could be chemical. They were also instructed to be wary of apartments with a bad smell or many window fans, which could also indicate bomb-making.
On August 28th and September 6–7, Zazi checked into a motel suite and used the suite’s kitchenette to make the chemicals he could use in bombs. The authorities examined the kitchenette and found traces of chemicals in the ventilation. Two days later, on September 9th, 2009, Zazi began a nearly 2,000-mile drive in a rented car from Denver, Colorado, to New York City with the bomb-making materials. But right on their heels, the FBI followed. The day after he left Denver, two New York police officers asked a local imam, Afzali, who also worked as a police informant, to identify four people from photographs. The imam identified Zazi, who had been praying in his mosque, and two of the three others in the photos as his companions.
Zazi arrived in New York City on the afternoon of September 10th. That same weekend he wanted to manufacture the final components of the bomb. He was poised to carry out the most extensive attack in New York City and the United States since 9/11.
But even upon arrival in New York City, things began to go wrong for Najibullah Zazi. As he crossed the George Washington Bridge, which connects the state of New Jersey with Upper Manhattan in New York City, he was detained by Port Authority police. Acting at the request of the FBI, what he was told was a routine random drug search, and his car was searched. They found nothing remarkable, and he was allowed to go. Afzali’s lawyer later wrote to the court:
“Even though Zazi is not the brightest bulb in the terrorist chandelier, the thinly-transparent ruse of a 'random' checkpoint stop did not fool him.”
On September 11th, Imam Afzali, who had served as an informant for the FBI, called Najibullah Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi. The father subsequently told his son that the imam had been shown pictures and added.
“So, before anything else, speak with Afzali. See if you need to go to Afzali or to make ... yourself aware, hire an attorney.”
During a telephone conversation with the imam, Najibullah Zazi learned that the authorities had questioned him and his friends. Later that day, Zazi’s rental car was removed for illegal parking and was searched. Here, FBI agents found a laptop computer with an image of nine handwritten pages on how to make explosives, detonators and fuses. The FBI later claimed that the handwritten notes were in Zazi’s handwriting. In a conversation with Imam Afzali, he said he feared he was being “surveilled”, and Afzali asked if there was any “evidence” in the car, which Zazi denied. Then it finally dawned on Najibullah Zazi that he was being watched, and he and the other terrorists threw away the bomb-making materials. The next day, Saturday, September 12th, Zazi flew home to Denver, Colorado.
A few days later, Najibullah Zazi’s phone rang at his home in Denver. It was a reporter from the New York Times who had picked up that there had been an exposed attack in the making and that it was connected to Najibullah Zazi[2].
“I have nothing to do with this,”
replied Najibullah Zazi. He acknowledged that he was increasingly pointing towards him and claimed he was shocked. Najibullah Zazi told the reporter that he had contacted a lawyer and that the FBI was welcome to question him.
“I hope I will get the chance to ask them why they are following me”,
He continued. He explained to the reporter that he thought the police might suspect him because he had a beard and had rented the car, which he thought had been stolen. He had subsequently learned that the vehicle had been removed, and after complaining to the police twice, he had finally cut short his stay and flown back to his home in Colorado.
But when FBI agents searched several homes on September 14th, two days after Zazi left New York, they found his fingerprints, a bunch of AA batteries and a dozen black backpacks. Equipment that could be used in a suicide bombing. On September 16th, Zazi voluntarily appeared at one of the FBI’s offices in Denver, where he was questioned for eight hours in the presence of his lawyer. He denied knowledge of the planned attack and the nine-page handwritten document on his hard drive containing notes and images. Zazi speculated that he must have accidentally downloaded it back in August as part of a religious book he had downloaded and later deleted.
However, during subsequent interrogations on 17 and 18 September, he admitted to having received explosives and weapons training during his stays in Pakistan. This meant that on September 19th, 2009, the FBI believed they had grounds to arrest and charge Zazi.
On September 23rd, 2009, 14 days after the plot was officially revealed, Najibullah Zazi was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in another country and supplying material to support a terrorist organization. Zazi faced a possible life sentence without the possibility of parole for the first two charges and an additional sentence of 15 years for the third.
On February 22nd, 2010, Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to all charges. He admitted that he was recruited by al-Qaeda in Pakistan for a suicide attack against the United States and that his bomb target was the New York City subway system. He was supposed to receive his sentence on June 25th 2010; however, in mid-April 2010, he was moved to an undisclosed location. Zazi was now cooperating with the American authorities.
A month before, the FBI had arrested two of his high school friends, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, who had travelled with him to Pakistan in 2008. They were both accused of having received military-like training from al-Qaeda, and Zazi was to be the crown witness in that case. In the US, investigators and prosecutors often offer a so-called “plea bargain”, i.e.,. A bull deal between the prosecutor and the defence, to the person who first agrees to cooperate with the authorities. It is a way of getting an accused to name his co-conspirators and, in return, often receive a reduced sentence.
While the police executed a search warrant at Medunjanin’s apartment, he left it and tried to turn his car into a terrorist weapon and become a martyr. Moments before he slammed into the back of another car on the Whitestone Expressway and fled on foot, Medunjanin called 911, identified himself and left his message of martyrdom. Then he shouted:
“We love death more than you love your life.”
A slogan used by al-Qaeda trainers to inspire recruits to commit murder and suicide. However, he was arrested before he could do any harm. He subsequently admitted to the authorities that he had been trained with Zazi at the al-Qaeda camp in Waziristan, Pakistan. However, Medunjanin pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan and to additional charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to al-Qaeda.
On May 21st 2012, just over two years after his arrest, Medunjanin was found guilty of all charges. Half a year later, he was imprisoned for life, partly based on Zazi’s testimony. Medunjanin responded by reciting several verses from the Koran and criticising US foreign policy when asked if he had anything to say.
Zazi’s other high school friend and co-conspirator, taxi driver Ahmedzay, was charged on the same counts as his co-conspirators. He initially pleaded not guilty, but on April 23rd 2010, he changed his mind and admitted to all the circumstances. He told the court that two senior al-Qaeda leaders approached him because of his knowledge of New York and that they had said that.
“The most important thing was to hit well-known structures and maximize the number of casualties”.
On December 14th 2018, Ahmedzay was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The last two to be convicted of planning the terrorist attack were Najibullah Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, and FBI informant Imam Ahmad Wais Afzali, who was found to be playing a double game. Mohammed Zazi was convicted of destroying evidence and lying to investigators, and on February 10th, 2021, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Imam Ahmad Afzali received a conviction for lying to the FBI about warning Najibullah Zazi. As part of his deal, he avoided having to serve prison time, but in return, he had to leave the United States. He may return only if he receives special permission.
We are back in 2019, when Najibullah Zazi stood before a judge in New York City court, nearly 10 years after pleading guilty to plotting to bomb the New York City subway system. Zazi had spent the time in prison getting an education and finishing the equivalent of high school.
“I tried my best to correct my terrible mistake by cooperating with the government,”
Zazi said in court. His head was shaved, with a slight hint of the beard he once had.
“I’m not the same person,”he said.
“I find it almost hard to imagine what I was involved in in 2008 and 2009. I’m very sorry, your honor, for all the harm I have caused, and I ask for forgiveness”.
Zazi’s letter to the New York City court outlined his radicalisation and reformation. He wrote that upon emigrating from Afghanistan to the United States, he became “a big fan of all New York City sports teams” and “supported America’s declaration of war on Afghanistan” after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, in 2007, he met two men who “seduced” him with sermons from Anwar-Al-Awlaki, an extremist Islamic preacher on the Internet. Zazi wrote that they convinced him that the US was on a mission to destroy all of Islam and that “if he did not act to protect Islam, he would be doomed forever in the afterlife”. [i]
“I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the United States military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan by sacrificing my soul for the sake of saving other souls,”he said.
Almost 10 years after Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to plotting to bomb the New York City subway system, Judge Raymond Dearie, whom we met at the beginning of this episode, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison. Thus, after the prosecutors told about Zazi’s “extraordinary cooperation” with the American investigators, he had effectively served his sentence and was a free man.
The story of Najibullah Zazi and his comrades is, in many ways, one of the few stories of terrorist attacks that ended well. The sources do not report whether something went wrong in Najibullah Zazi’s life and, if so, what. But at least he fell into the clutches of the wrong people who radicalised him and convinced him that violence was the goal to strike back at the injustices they believed the US had committed against them. Funnily enough, as in all other wars, it is never the people who themselves go to the front and sacrifice their own life and limb in the attacks that convince others to become martyrs. Where Najibullah Zazi is today and if he really has regretted his previous actions - apart from the fact that they cost him 10 years in prison - history, unfortunately, does not report anything about that either. But at least he got what many terrorists and their victims never get – another chance.
