Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan legal resident at the center of an FBI terrorism investigation, was ordered held without bail today after pleading not guilty in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York to the charge of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2332a(a)(2). Federal prosecutors contend that Zazi planned to travel to New York City to detonate homemade bombs as part of an al-Qaeda related plot. Indeed, they detailed some of the evidence they will likely use at trial in the detention memorandum they filed on September 24th. The memorandum suggests that Zazi obtained bomb-making and explosives training during a trip to Pakistan in August 2008 and stored on his computer detailed instructions on how to build bombs using chemicals found in readily available beauty products. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Knox also indicated that the prosecution will make use of classified evidence collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Zazi’s lawyer, J. Michael Dowling, stated after the hearing that the evidence outlined in the memorandum was insufficient to support conspiracy charges, as the Government has yet to produce someone else with whom Zazi agreed to commit the criminal act.
For more information, please see the articles at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg.