WASHINGTON: Speculation is growing that mundane money worries and a sense of personal failure have finally sent Shahzad, right, over the edge. For answers to the mystery of what drove Faisal Shahzad to try to turn downtown New York into a fireball, a poke among the rubbish in the back garden of his former home in Connecticut offers some torn and crumpled clues.
Blowing around last week on the overgrown lawn was a discarded cache of personal mail, dumped there during a clearout when he abruptly vacated the house last year. The tale they tell, though, is not of contacts with shadowy terrorist groups or plots against the West, but a narrative that millions of ordinary Americans can identify with since the financial meltdown of 2008. One is a letter from the Connecticut Superior Court, demanding he attend a repossession hearing on his home; another is from a debt collection agency, saying he owed them more than $15,000.
A third message is friendlier in tone, but reveals just why his financial woes might have worried him so much - it is a pink greetings card addressed to him and his wife, Huma, which reads “Congratulations on your new little girl!” Just what else might have turned a seemingly normal young family man into a terrorist is still being unravelled by anti-terror police in New York, who yesterday continued to interrogate the former financial analyst over suspected links to militants in Pakistan.
A week after his botched attempt to detonate an SUV rigged with a homemade bomb in Times Square, the city remains under high alert: this weekend, police with radiation detectors were checking subway passengers” bags, and any abandoned vehicle drew the close attention of bomb squad officers. Yet as Americans wrestle once again with the perplexing mystery of so-called “cleanskin” terrorists in their midst, speculation is growing that it have been mundane money worries and a sense of personal failure that finally sent Shahzad over the edge. Former friends recall a bright, cheerful man who cared little for religion when he got married back in Pakistan six years ago, but whose personality dramatically soured from 2008 onwards - almost in tune with the darkening economic climate. “He lost his way during the financial problems,” said one friend, who asked not to be named.
Or, as one Connecticut policeman put it, in rather blunter fashion: “He got screwed by the recession just like the rest of us, only he chose to react the way he did.” It is not clear what has happened to Shahzadís Americanborn wife, Huma Mian, who bore him two children. His marriage to a US citizen had enabled him to convert his temporary US work permit into a residential green card.
Unseen since the bomb attempt, Mian is now thought to be in Saudi Arabia. There were few answers in Mohib Banda, the Shahzad familyís ancestral home 20 miles from Peshawar. Faiz Ahmad, a former village mayor, said Shahzadís closest relatives had gone into hiding. Locals who knew Shahzad said he had shown no trace of extremism and the only sign of any change came 18 months ago at a wedding. ìHe was sporting a beard and was reserved and quiet,î said Ahmad. His second cousin, Kifayat Ali, a Peshawar lawyer, said: ìShahzad comes from a very respectable family.
They are not so religious. î The portrait of Shahzad that American officials have so far pieced together remains full of contradictions and gaps. He was drowning in debt and his threebedroom family home in Connecticut, bought for $273,000, was in foreclosure. Yet it has since emerged that he was able to afford at least half a dozen trips back to Pakistan in the past 11 years. He first appeared on a US security database for bringing $80,000 into the country in cash between 1999 and 2008.
He had a business degree and his job as a financial analyst paid him up to $80,000 a year. In February 2009 he was granted a home loan of $65,000 on top of his $200,000 mortgage, even though the US mortgage meltdown had already begun. Yet by last November he was taken to court by a home heating firm that claimed he owed $793.34.
Other debts went unpaid, but after a trip to Pakistan in February he had the cash to make rent payments on a $1,150-a-month apartment and paid $1,300 in $100 bills for the Nissan sports utility vehicle that he rigged with $2,000 worth of explosives and drove to Times Square last weekend. When he tried to flee the country on Monday he also paid about $800 in cash for a oneway ticket to Islamabad.
This weekend, the hunt is continuing worldwide for whoever may have helped Shahzad nurture his grievances and ultimately put them into action. For whatever outside help he may have had, it is clear that the “sub-prime bomber”, as he might be dubbed, was nothing less than substandard in delivery. Shahzad, who has been nicknamed by the US media as “Idiot Bomber” will go down in history as arguably America’’s least professional terrorist.
Not only did his device fail to explode, he accidentally left the keys to a second getaway car inside the bomb car, and also used a mobile phone number that was registered in his own name. Even the Taliban’’s description of his attempt of his attempt as “brave” seems a little over-generous.
Terrorism expert Rahimullah Yusufzai points out, more committed Jihadists would have tried to blow themselves up, not a vehicle. Yusufzai added: “Shahzad, I think, had commitment but not in the way more committed militants would be operating. They would have blown themselves up, while Shahzad tried to escape.
That shows he was not fully signed up. He wanted to do harm but did not quite have the guts to take it to its conclusion.” Shahzad has told investigators that he was a “fan and follower” of the Yemen-based militant Anwar al-Awlaki. Shahzadís family is rich and well-respected. One sister is a doctor, another is a schoolteacher, and his older brother moved to Canada to work as a mechanical engineer.
Shahzad, too, moved to study in the US in 1999 to gain a degree in computer science. When he married his partner Huma Mian, a Pakistani emigre from Colorado, the wedding was notable for mixed couples dancing ñ a sign that both families had a modern outlook. Indeed, to their neighbours in the Connecticut town of Sheldon, they were just another ordinary couple pursuing the Middle American dream. “They lived well. He worked, she didn”t, and she just seemed to shop. My daughter used to play with her daughter every day and she came across as decent and genuine,” said a neighbour Brenda Thurman, 37, a restaurant worker. Distinct changes were detected in her husband by 2008, neighbours remember. There were rants about George W Bush being a war criminal, and criticism of US drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan. “They should not be shooting people from the sky. They should come down and fight,” Shahzad used to say.
During his visits to Pakistan he frowned old acquaintances for drinking whisky. “Last year when I saw him, he was changed person as he didn”t take interest in anything,” said Zaheer Khan, a neighbour in his village Mohib Banda. Psychologist James Monahan said: “By doing what he did he discredited his family and dishonoured them.
He was clearly disturbed, impulsive and immature and his anxieties spilled out against the US. He literally wanted to go out with a bang, to make a name for himself.” According to explosive experts, Shahzad even used the wrong kind of fertiliser in the device, meaning it was never likely to detonate properly. “He was trained, but he certainly did not graduate at the top of the class,” said retired NYPD bomb squad member Kevin Barry.
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