Once again, the NYPD anti-terrorism squad has prevented New York from falling victim to a home-grown Islamic terrorist’s plans for mass murder.
Jose Pimentel, a k a Muhammad Yusuf, was just an hour or so away from completing three homemade bombs when he was arrested Saturday, police said.
He reportedly planned to target GIs and Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and police here and in New Jersey.
According to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the Dominican-born convert to Islam was a follower of the now-slain extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and tried unsuccessfully to contact him.
But he got all the bomb-making information he needed from Awlaki’s Web site — which also inspired him to declare that “Islamic law obligated all true Muslims to wage war against the United States.”
Which is why it doesn’t matter that Pimentel — who had been under surveillance for two years — was a lone wolf and not part of a wider conspiracy.
And why it’s disingenuous for FBI sources to suggest, as they reportedly do, that the agency never considered him a genuine terrorist threat.
The fact remains that Pimentel, by all accounts, was so motivated to attack his chosen targets that he spent years educating himself in the art of bomb-making.
And he was able to buy all the necessary ingredients at local stores.
Though he confided in someone who turned out to be an NYPD informant, there is no suggestion that he was enticed or entrapped into this scheme.
“People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare,” he wrote on his blog last May.
Awlaki and Osama bin Laden may be dead — thanks to US forces — but their words continue to “inspire” and educate would-be jihadists both abroad and here at home.
Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg noted, this is the 14th terror attack plot against New York that has been foiled since 9/11.
Which is why New Yorkers should be thankful that its police department has been collecting information and conducting surveillance of Muslim communities.
Because, sad to say, the number of terrorist plots against this city won’t stop at 14.