B005OWFTDW EBOK

  Today, I’m sitting across from Stolar in his grotty fourth-floor law office above lower Broadway between a carry-out called New Fancy Food and a store that sells ‘Hats & Sun Glass’. He is smoking Merit cigarettes, still hippie skinny with a beard now silvery grey. He has agreed to talk to me about the only other convicted Pakistani bombplotter in New York City.

  His client, Shahawar Matin Siraj, was found guilty by a federal jury of participating in a conspiracy to attack the Herald Square subway station in 2004, three days before the Republican National Convention was to begin at Madison Square Garden. Twenty-three at the time, Siraj was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Today he’s in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

  Siraj’s mother, Shaina Berbeen, who was a physician with her own clinic in Karachi, told me her family had left Pakistan for the US in 1999, the same year as Shahzad. They had fled persecution for being Ismailis, a branch of Shias sometimes referred to as Agakhanis. Berbeen and her daughter Saniya Siraj, now twenty-four, told me about severe physical punishment of Ismaili students, including Siraj, at the hands of Sunni teachers. Berbeen also shared with me a forensic psychological evaluation of her son, which placed his IQ at seventy-eight, ‘the borderline of intellectual functioning … [a level] surpassed by 93 per cent of the population’.

  In 2002, Berbeen’s husband became severely ill and Siraj was the family’s sole support. He worked first at fast-food chain Blimpie, and then as a clerk in his uncle’s store, Islamic Books and Tapes, next door to the Brooklyn mosque known as Masjid Musab Bin Omayer.

  ‘Cohen,’ Stolar tells me, ‘instituted a programme directed at the Muslim community to develop confidential informants and undercover agents. By the time we get to Siraj in 2004, I don’t think there’s a mosque in New York City that doesn’t have a CI or an undercover.’

  Police sources tell me that foreign-born nationals are easy to turn into CIs – confidential informants. If a taxi driver gets into a tussle over a fare, gets reported and turns out to have immigration issues, the police can threaten him with deportation. ‘You become a CI and you won’t be deported.’ It’s a method the police have used for decades. Siraj had a CI assigned to him, an Egyptian nuclear engineer named Osama Eldawoody who had been drawn in because he had run a number of failed businesses out of his Queens apartment, prompting neighbours to call the police. The government paid Eldawoody’s expenses, as well as $94,000 for his work as an informant on the case.

  The undercover officer in Siraj’s case was a native of Bangladesh who used the pseudonym Kamil Pasha. ‘He’s recruited in the classic NYPD way,’ Stolar says. ‘They troll the police academy to find someone who fits the targeted group. They started doing this with the Black Panther Party back in the sixties. So they get someone who’s, number one, young, and number two, not known on the street. And they say, we promise you a gold shield, a detective’s shield, if you do this.’

  The cop and the CI had no knowledge of each other. July 2003 they began visiting the bookstore where Siraj was working. Eldawoody, fifty at the time, was old enough to be Siraj’s father; Pasha, at twenty-three, was more of a buddy. In seventy-two visits with Siraj, he was able to cull what the jury considered ‘radical statements’, such as Siraj praising Osama bin Laden as ‘a talented brother and a great planner’.

  None of Pasha and Siraj’s conversations were tape-recorded, and Eldawoody only began recording their encounters after he’d been meeting with Siraj for nine months. It’s hard, therefore, to gauge what role the two men played in the conversation about the planned bomb attack.

  In April 2004, the images of torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad surfaced in the media. When Siraj saw the image of the hooded Iraqi prisoner, attached to wires, standing on a box, he became hysterical. ‘Turn it off, Mommy! Turn it off!’ Siraj shrieked. Trial testimony showed that Eldawoody gave him photographs of a Muslim girl being raped by a dog. He is soon discussing the placement of the bomb with Siraj and his co-defendant, a twenty-one-year-old schizophrenic Egyptian who turned state’s evidence in the case. Siraj, in this recording, says, ‘No killing. Only economic problems.’ He explains, ‘If somebody dies, then the blame will come on me. Allah doesn’t see those situations as accidents.’ In earlier audio recordings, however, he has said, ‘I want at least a thousand to two thousand to die in one day.’

  At one point, under pressure from Eldawoody, the mildly retarded Siraj puts him off by saying, ‘I’ll have to check with my mother.’ He never did. Berbeen said she never met either of the men who spent so much time with her son. But her daughter did. ‘He was suspicious,’ Siraj’s sister said. ‘First of all, nobody helps anyone in America. He’s giving my brother rides all the time. It costs a lot of money to drive from Bay Ridge to Queens.

  ‘One time Eldawoody told my dad, “Your son is a diamond. A hero.” I think no one ever saw Matin that way. You know, it’s like Batman. He wanted to be a superhero. Honestly, all my brother did in his spare time was video games. I think, on some level, he wanted to be in one of them.’

  ‘This guy was a nebbish,’ Stolar tells me. ‘Look, I’m a defence attorney. I know how to make shit up and bend the facts, but this wasn’t bending the facts. This was classic entrapment.’

  On Monday, 21 June 2010, I was among the reporters filing into the courtroom of federal judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum in lower Manhattan. We’d come for Faisal Shahzad’s arraignment after a federal grand jury had returned a ten-count terrorism indictment. We expected a five-minute perfunctory exchange; Shahzad would probably enter the typical ‘not-guilty’ plea.

  Shahzad was cuffed and shackled, and Cedarbaum removed her reading glasses each time he answered a question so she could study his face. After the preliminaries, Cedarbaum began, ‘I have to discuss some other things with you …’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘… because I want to be sure that this plea is entirely voluntary and that you are entering it with full understanding of the consequences of entering a plea of guilty.’

  He was going to plead guilty. The reporter next to me turned, his eyes opened wide. Meanwhile, Shahzad was interrupting.

  ‘Before you do that …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘… can I say to you my plea of guilty? I just want to say a small statement.’

  ‘I think you should wait.’

  ‘OK.’

  After several questions, Cedarbaum asked, ‘Why do you want to plead guilty?’

  ‘I want to plead guilty and I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times forward because until the hour the US pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking the US, and I plead guilty to that.

  ‘OK,’ he went on, fumbling with some paper. ‘With the assistance …’

  ‘Oh, please,’ the judge said. ‘Don’t read it. I want to know what happened. Tell me what you did.’

  Shahzad tried again to read something because, he said, ‘It covers all the elements.’ But then he gave up and just started talking.

  ‘Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I … with them, I did the training to wage an attack inside United States of America.’

  ‘I see. How to make a bomb or how to detonate a bomb? What were you taught?’

  ‘The whole thing; how to make a bomb, how to detonate a bomb, how to put a fuse, how many different types of bombs you can make.’

  Shahzad went through the previous year’s timeline with her. He became a US citizen in May 2009, and then left on 2 June for Pakistan (‘for good’) with the intention of ‘trying to figure out a way to get to the Taliban’. He stayed with his parents in their Peshawar house. Finally, on 9 December, he and two friends made contact with the Taliban in Waziristan where he stayed until 25 January 2010. His actual bomb-making training lasted only five days.

  At times their
conversation lapsed into a seminar, with Shahzad the tutor on Taliban politics.

  ‘Is there a particular Taliban?’ Cedarbaum asked at one point.

  ‘Well, there are two Talibans; one is Taliban Afghanistan, the other is Taliban Pakistan. And I went to join the Taliban Pakistan.’

  ‘I see. Has that always been there?’

  ‘It recently … they … the organization was made … was made like six years ago when the first time Pakistan took a U-turn on the Taliban Afghanistan, and obviously the tribal area in Pakistan is the … was the harbouring for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. So the Pakistan took a U-turn and they became allied with the US and they went against the Taliban and start fighting and killing them. So during that time, the Afghan Taliban made a group to counter the Pakistan government forces, and that’s when Taliban Pakistan came into being. Six years ago, maybe.’

  ‘Do the people you dealt with in the Taliban all speak English?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, they speak Pashto. Pashto is my mother language. I am Pashtun ethnically.’

  ‘I see. And all the Taliban are Pashtun, all the Afghans are Pashtun?’

  ‘Or most of them; not all of them. Majority. So I did speak with them in Pashto when I was communicating with them.’

  ‘I see. Pashto is spoken in Pakistan?’

  ‘Yes. Peshawar, the whole North West Frontier Province is all Pashto speaking, which was part of Afghanistan before the British broke it.’

  The operation’s financing was under $10,000. Shahzad supplied $4,500 of his own money, the Taliban added $4,900. ‘When I came back on February 2nd, I started … started planning on the plan,’ he explained. ‘So I started looking for a place first to rent and slowly got together what I think could make a bomb … It took me from February up to end of April to do all that.

  ‘The bomb was – it was in three sections that I made the bomb. The major was the fertilizer bomb. That was in the trunk. It was in a cabinet, a gun cabinet. The second was … if that plan of the actual, that didn’t work, then the second would be the cylinder, the gas cylinders I had. And the third I had was a petrol, a gas to make fire in the car. But seems like none of those went off, and I don’t know the reason why they didn’t go off. And then …’

  ‘When did you expect them to go off? How long did you think it would take?’

  ‘Two and a half to five minutes. I was waiting to hear a sound but I couldn’t hear any sound, so I thought it probably didn’t go off, so I just … walked to the Grand Central and I went home.’

  ‘You took the train to Bridgeport.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cedarbaum, perhaps confused by the prosaic act of catching a suburban train after planting a lethal bomb, asked whether he did intend for the bombs to go off. Oh yes, Shahzad told her. And he chose Times Square on a Saturday night so he could maximize the mayhem? ‘Yes. Damage to the building and to injure or kill people. But again, I would point out one thing in connection to the attack, that one has to understand where I’m coming from, because this is … I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier. The US and the Nato forces, along with forty, fifty countries has attacked the Muslim lands. We –’

  Cedarbaum interrupted. ‘But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night,’ she said slowly. ‘Did you look around to see who they were?’

  ‘Well, the people select the government. We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit –’

  ‘Including the children?’ the judge interrupted him once again.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq,’ he finally said, ‘they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.’

  ‘Now we’re not talking about them; we’re talking about you.’

  ‘Well, I am part of that. I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks because only … like and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks because only … like living in US, the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die. Similarly, in Gaza Strip, somebody has to go and live with the family whose house is bulldozed by the Israeli bulldozer. There’s a lot of aggression …’

  ‘In Afghanistan?’

  ‘In Gaza Strip.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We Muslims are one community. We’re not divided.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to get drawn into a discussion of the Quran.’

  Shahzad’s reasoning – shared by suicide bombers in Gaza, Sri Lanka and elsewhere – was that his act was a war tactic. Aerial bombing by states cannot avoid killing children. Hence, terror bombings by militants that kill children are a logical response.

  The anti-terror police have a programme – so far successful – to prevent another 9/11, but it cannot address root causes – American foreign policy – and the chances that the mediocre son of a self-made military man will try to show his father what’s what. Some attacks don’t need the authorities to prevent them, however. Shahzad was as sub par a soldier as he was a financial analyst. In court, he told Judge Cedarbaum that he still didn’t know why his triple redundant bomb failed to ignite sometime after six thirty on a Saturday night. ‘The timer on the detonator, it was on military time,’ a police source later told me. ‘He set it for seven. That was 7 a.m. on this thing. For 7 p.m., what he wanted, it should have been 19.00.’

  The New York Police Department declined to comment on the case of Shahawar Matin Siraj or the Times Square bomber and its counterterrorism programme.

  GRANTA

  THE SINS

  OF THE MOTHER

  Jamil Ahmad

  NIZAM DAHIRI

  Split Drawing, 2007

  Ballpoint pen on paper. 55.8 x 71.1 cms.

  Photography © Maheen Zia.

  In the tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, is a military outpost manned by about two score soldiers.

  Lonely, as all such posts are, this one is particularly frightening. No habitation for miles around and no vegetation except for a few wasted and barren date trees leaning crazily against each other and no water other than a trickle among some salt-encrusted boulders which also dries out occasionally, manifesting a degree of hostility.

  Nature has not remained content merely at this. In this land, she has also created the dreaded bad-e-sad-o-bist-roz, the wind of a hundred and twenty days. This wind rages almost continuously during the four winter months, blowing clouds of alkali-laden dust and clinker so thick that men can barely breathe or open their eyes when they happen to get caught in it.

  It was but natural that some men would lose their minds after too long an exposure to such desolation and loneliness. In the course of time, therefore, a practice developed of not letting any soldier stay at this post for two years running so that none had to face the ravages of the storm for more than four months.

  It was during one of these quiet spells that the man and woman came across this post hidden in the folds of the hills. The wind had been blowing with savage fury for three days and if its force had not suddenly abated, they would have missed the post altogether and with it the only source of water for miles around. Indeed, they had steeled themselves to travel on during the approaching night when the impenetrable curtain of dust and sand seemed to lift and reveal the fort with its unhappy-looking date trees.

  The soldiers, who had remained huddled behind closed shutters while the wind blew, had come out into the open as soon as the sky cleared. Sick and dispirited after three days and nights in darkened airless and fetid-smelling rooms, they were walking about, busy cleaning themselves and drawing in gulps of fresh air. They had to make the most of this brief respite before the wind started again.

 
; Some of the men noticed the two figures and their camel as they topped the rise and moved slowly and hesitantly towards the fort. Both were staggering as they approached. The woman’s clothes, originally black, as those of the man, were grey with dust and sand, lines of caked mud standing out sharply where sweat had soaked into the folds. Even the small mirrors lovingly stitched as decorations into the woman’s dress and the man’s cap seemed faded and lacklustre.

  The woman was covered from head to foot in garments but, on drawing closer, her head covering slipped and exposed her face to the watching soldiers. She made an ineffectual gesture to push it up again, but appeared too weary to care and spent all her remaining energy walking step after step towards the group of men.

  When the veil slipped from the woman’s face, most of the soldiers turned their heads away, but those who did not saw that she was hardly more than a child. If her companion’s looks did not, the sight of her red-rimmed swollen eyes, her matted hair and the unearthly expression on her face told the story clearly.

  The man motioned the woman to stop and walked up, by himself, to the subedar commanding the fort. He kept a frenzied grip on the barrel of an old and rusty gun that he carried across his shoulders.

  He had no time to waste over any triviality.

  ‘Water,’ his hoarse voice said from between cracked and bleeding lips. ‘Our water is finished, spare us some water.’ The subedar pointed wordlessly towards a half-empty bucket from which the soldiers had been drinking. The man lifted the bucket and drew back towards the woman who was now huddled on the ground.