The Bangladeshi man who plotted to blow the Federal Reserve building to smithereens last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison today in Brooklyn federal court.
Quazi Nafis, 22, conspired with undercover agents to set off a 1,000-pound bomb with a cell phone detonation system intended to level the financial nerve center.
The diminutive terrorist pleaded for mercy from Judge Carol Bagley Amon and apologized profusely for the murderous scheme.
“I am ashamed,” he told the court in a beige prison suit. “I’m lost. I tried to do a terrible thing. I alone am responsible for all I’ve done. Please forgive me. I’m really ashamed that I believed in radical Islam. I know it’s wrong. It’s wrong.”
Nafis – who blamed a childhood stuttering issue and an unfaithful girlfriend for his drift towards radical ideology – insisted that he has since reformed himself.
“I apologize to New York City especially,” he said. “I apologize to my parents. I have failed them, I have broken their hearts. Your honor, please have mercy on me, please forgive me, I’m really terribly sorry for what I’ve done.”
But federal prosecutor James Loonam lobbied for a stiff sentence from the court and outlined the harrowing details of the plot.
Loonam described how Nafis sat in a hotel room and repeatedly called a cell phone number that he thought would set off a massive explosion that would have killed untold victims.
“The defendant posed a real and imminent threat to the security of the United States,” he argued, adding that the defendant shared similar characteristics to the Boston bombers who set off a lethal explosion earlier this year.
Loonam said that Nafis had every intention of assembling a terror cell and that his plot was only scuttled when he contacted a government informant.
“This was not idle chatter,” he said. “He wanted something very big, something that would shake the country.”
Loonam showed an eerie video of Nafis loitering near the New York Stock Exchange with a notebook and pen as he tried to decide on a terror target.
The prosecutor also dismissed Nafis’s claim that the stammering turned him into an impressionable loner, noting that there was barely any trace of the disability in interviews conducted after his arrest.
Judge Amon conceded that Nafis had left the terrorist life behind but still blasted him for trying to follow through on his devious designs.
“I am persuaded that the defendant was a serious threat to te saftey of new Yorkers and Americans,” she said before handing down her sentence of 330 months in prison.
Nafis’s lawyer, Heidi Cesare, who had asked for a 20-year sentence, looked over at her client and confirmed that he would be spending the next three decades of his life.
He remained expressionless as he was led out of court.