Opinion

Stopping terror the New York way

After the Twin Towers crumbled on 9/11, New York state gave local prosecutors some powerful new tools to try to prevent future terrorist attacks. In Manhattan, we’re using them.

Yesterday, Ahmed Ferhani was sentenced in state Supreme Court to 10 years in prison. It marked the first time a defendant plotting terrorist acts was convicted under New York’s post-9/11 terrorism laws.

Ferhani had one overarching goal — to terrorize Jewish New Yorkers by blowing up synagogues. In the moments before his arrest, he bought a grenade and three handguns from an undercover officer of the NYPD Intelligence Division, fully intending to carry out his attack.

Based on the evidence against him from an eight-month NYPD undercover operation and Manhattan DA investigation, Ferhani was charged with Conspiracy as a Crime of Terrorism, Criminal Possession of a Weapon as a Crime of Terrorism and Criminal Sale of a Firearm as a Crime of Terrorism. He pled guilty after seeing both the mountains of evidence the NYPD had collected and the powerful case that we in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had built against him.

When he admitted to his crime in court, he told the judge, “By targeting a synagogue, which I knew to be a Jewish house of worship, I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City.”

When New York’s anti-terrorism law was enacted, some wondered what the point was, when such crimes are typically handled by federal authorities. But governments, acting together, must use all the tools in their toolbox to prevent possible attacks, and this lone-wolf ideologue is precisely the type of criminal that our law was created to thwart.

Nowhere are the stakes higher than here in Manhattan, the symbol of so much that violent radicals hate about the West: open to new ideas, tolerant of people different from us and providing equal opportunities for success to all.

Terrorists seek to break our will and change our ways with violence. But our response to Ferhani’s attempt at depraved violence was one of tempered civility. That is who we are as Americans. We must continue to maintain our values, our composure and our tactical edge in the face of ideologically-driven violence.

In addition to working with the NYPD to arrest and prosecute would-be terrorists in Manhattan, we are also cutting off potential sources of terror financing by aggressively policing banking transactions involving rogue nations.

Since 2009, the DA’s Office, working with federal partners, has built cases against six banks that were moving money in violation of international sanctions. The banks removed information likely to alert federal regulators to the identity of their sanctioned clients, including those in Iran, Libya and Sudan.

In total, the six banks have forfeited about $2.4 billion, with roughly half of those funds being paid to New York City and state. More important, each institution has stopped the flow of money to state sponsors of terrorism or other hostile nations.

The NYPD and the Manhattan DA’s Office prevented Ferhani from accomplishing his violent goals. As a result, he was sentenced yesterday to a decade behind bars and will face deportation when released.

Despite the evil that he tried to perpetrate, the Ferhani case should be remembered not only as another failed terrorist attack, but also as an example of how local prosecutors and local police in New York will do everything in their power to prevent terrorists from succeeding in the post-9/11 era.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is the Manhattan district attorney.