He dreamed of blowing up 10 synagogues — simultaneously, on the same remote detonator — and grinned like a child when he bought what he thought was a live grenade.
Yesterday, Islamic bomb plotter Ahmed Ferhani pleaded guilty to 10 hate and terror counts — giving Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. the first state-level terror conviction in New York history.
In return for his plea, the mentally ill Algerian agreed to serve a 10-year prison sentence offered him by a Manhattan judge over the objection of prosecutors, who had asked for 14 years.
“We’ll blow all those motherf–kers up at the same time,” he was caught saying on tape. “Imagine that, bro. Imagine what that would be like.”
Yesterday, Ferhani admitted in court that, by targeting synagogues, he intended to “send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City, warning them to stop mistreating Muslims.”
The sentence is a significant break for Ferhani, in light of the potential maximum of 32 years he had faced had he gone to trial and been convicted of the top counts.
After serving his 10-year term, he faces “inevitable” deportation, said Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus.
Defense lawyers tried to portray Ferhani, 27, arrested in May 2011, as a stooge who was entrapped.
But surveillance cameras recorded him seeking specific weapons, calling himself a mastermind and “showing great excitement at handling a grenade,” prosecutor Margaret Gandy told the judge yesterday.
After the plea, Vance told The Post, “Those who suggest that we should have stood on the sidelines and waited while the plot moved forward were proven by today’s plea to be wrong-minded — or just to be wrong.”