Federal agents meticulously crafted the most realistic weapons possible for the Bronx terror suspects so they wouldn’t realize the whole thing was a government setup, sources said yesterday.
An FBI informant furnished the four men with legitimate explosives and a missile launcher for their alleged plot to destroy two synagogues and Air Force jets. But the weapons had been rendered harmless.
For the bombs, the bureau handed the jihadist wannabes a supply of military-grade C4 explosives whose deadly properties had been nullified through a chemical process, sources said.
Even had the plastic explosives been run through any kind of chemical testing, they would have registered as the real deal, the sources said.
As for the missile launcher, the FBI gave the ex-cons a real Stinger missile launcher, which they allegedly intended to use to blast a massive C5 Galaxy cargo plane out of the sky as it took off from a Air Force base near Newburgh, in Orange County.
But the feds had disabled the firing mechanism, so while the laser-guided tracking system and warhead were functioning, the weapon would never have been able to be fired, the sources said.
Additionally, the sources said, the informant managed to take an illegal handgun that the suspects had purchased from a Bloods gang member in Brooklyn to FBI officials, who then filed down the firing pin, making it useless.
In the end, the four suspected plotters — James Cromitie, 45, David Williams, 28, Laguerre Payen, 37, and Onta Williams, 32 — posed no great danger to officers when they were busted after allegedly planting the phony bombs outside two Bronx synagogues.
Religious leaders and elected officials gathered outside the Riverdale Jewish Center yesterday to express their relief that the sinister plot had been foiled.
“Let this moment not be defined by four idiots, by four cowards and their plan. Let it be defined by the many voices of different religions, the song that we should sing as one united choir,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.
As more details of the four men’s hatred of America emerged, their stunned relatives sought to distance themselves even further from the suspected terrorists.
“Right now, that is not her son,” Cromitie’s sister, Wanda Walker, said of their mother. “My mom doesn’t want to visit him in jail. Why would we want to visit someone we don’t even know anymore?”
And a regretful Onta Williams broke down to his girlfriend in a jailhouse call. “He’s sorry about everything,” said his uncle, Richard, describing his nephew as “weak and easy to manipulate.”
“He’s mad at himself and he doesn’t know how he’ll deal with it.”
The FBI caught on to the suspects’ anti-American venom after the informant fell in with the men at a Newburgh mosque, where they had bonded because they were all ex-cons who had recently turned to Islam.
But members of the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque said the informant, identified by sources as Shahed Hussain, 52, had long been trying to recruit worshippers there for jihad.
“Everyone knew to stay away from him. We even tried to tell James [Cromitie] to stay away from him, but he didn’t listen,” said Abdul Wali, 29.
“He offered work to people; I believe he had a construction business. Maybe that’s how he befriended James.”
Roeshawn Strong, 34, said the man would always talk about waging a holy war.
“He mainly talked about jihad and how people need to fight,” he said.
“I found it strange that this was the first thing he would talk about when he met someone.”
One of the four suspects, Payen, a native Haitian who is mentally ill and on antipsychosis medication, had been battling immigration authorities since 2005, when they moved to kick him out of the United States for shooting two 16-year-olds with a BB gun.
Additional reporting by Perry Chiaramonte, Lorena Mongelli and Douglas Montero