He’d dreamed of blowing up ten synagogues — simultaneously, on the same remote detonator. He called himself a “mastermind,” yearned for “chaos and ruckus,” and grinned like an excited child moments before his Midtown arrest, as he purchased what he thought was a live grenade and then held it in his hand.
Islamic bomb plotter Ahmed Ferhani pleaded guilty to all ten of the hate and terror felonies lodged against him today — giving Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., the first state-level terror conviction in New York state.
In return for his admission of guilt, the mentally-ill Algerian immigrant agreed to serve a 10-year prison sentence offered him by a Manhattan judge over the objection of prosecutors, who’d asked for 14 years.
“We’ll blow all those motherf—ers up at the same time,” he was caught on tape saying, musing about hiding explosives in ten synagogues and connecting them to a single detonation device. “Imagine that, bro. Imagine what that would be like.”
Today’s admission of guilt, which he read aloud while wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and sitting cuffed before a judge at a well-guarded defendant table, was more formal.
“By targeting a synagogue, which I knew to be a Jewish house of worship, in this manner, I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City, warning them to stop mistreating Muslims,” he admitted.
The ten-year sentence, to be executed on January 30 by the same judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus, is a significant break from the potential maximum of 32 years Ferhani had faced had he gone to trial and been convicted of the top terror and hate crime conspiracy counts against him. After serving his ten-year term, he faces “inevitable” deportation back to Algeria, the judge said.
Defense lawyers have tried to portray Ferhani as a set-up stooge. But surveillance cameras recorded Ferhani cogently seeking specific weapons, calling himself a mastermind and “showing great excitement at handling a grenade,” prosecutor Margaret Gandy told the judge today.
“He was excited with the power,” she said of Ferhani, who was caught on tape telling under covers he wanted to buy a box more of the devices. Grenades, he gushed, could easily be thrown into churches and — two at a time — into synagogues.
“I want to mastermind this sh–,” he was recorded saying on May 9, two days before his arrest.
Ferhani, who prosecutors called a drug dealer with a history of a knife-point robbery, was captured on sting tape last year calling Jews “rats” and saying he wanted to grow a beard and curly hair locks to more easily sneak into a synagogue and plant explosives.
After the plea, Vance responded in an telephone interview to previous criticisms that federal prosecutors had turned their own noses up at prosecuting Ferhani, calling him too crazy, too easily entrapped by undercovers.
“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,” Vance told The Post.
“The suggestion was that he was crazy, that this was all BS, that it wasn’t a real terrorism threat,” he said of those detractors. “But the people who commit these crimes are dangerous people to begin with — they’re doing irrational things to begin with. So to say that because they’re acting irrationally that you shouldn’t intercede is crazy. These are exactly the kind of guys who are engaging in this kind of conduct.”
Vance credited the NYPD intelligence bureau and his own rackets bureau with clinching the conviction.
“But for his getting arrested, he was intent on going forward,” the judge noted before accepting Ferhani’s plea. “When that would have happened, and precisely how that would have happened, we will never know.”
Responded Gary Galperin, the rackets bureau’s senior investigative counsel, “Forgive the pun, your honor, but this defendant’s actions showed that he was a time bomb. We strongly do not believe that 10 years is sufficient.”
After court, Ferhani’s lawyer, Lamis Deek, suggested that her client took a plea primarily because the judge came up with the right number. “He said what he needed to say to get the ten years,” she said.
The judge had initially wanted Ferhani to serve 12 years — but was swayed to give two years less by defense arguments that Ferhani suffered from documented mental health issues, including a propensity to cut himself and threaten to do harm to himself, she said.
“He’s been getting institutionalized for years,” she said.
“My congratulations to District Attorney Vance for successfully prosecuting this important case. He rose to the occasion in making sure Ahmed Ferhani received significant jail time. In his allocution, Ferhani made clear – as our Intelligence Division detectives documented – that he intended to attack a Manhattan synagogue with a hand grenade and gunfire, for the purpose of intimidating and coercing the Jewish population of New York City,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly