Nation/World

‘I did it for the Islamic State,’ New York bombing suspect told investigators

NEW YORK — Along his journey Monday morning toward a crowded subway tunnel below Midtown Manhattan, a would-be suicide bomber posted a statement to his Facebook page deriding President Donald Trump, the federal authorities said Tuesday. Then, among the throngs of commuters, he detonated a homemade pipe bomb affixed to his torso with the aim of inflicting as much death as possible.

The allegations were contained in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday against the bombing suspect, Akayed Ullah, 27, an immigrant from Bangladesh who had lived for several years in Brooklyn. Because his crude bomb malfunctioned, he survived his own attack and has been charged with five federal counts that include the use of weapons of mass destruction, provision of material support to the Islamic State and bombing a place of public use.

The complaint said that Ullah, who has been held at Bellevue Hospital Center, admitted to investigators that he had built the pipe bomb and carried out the attack.

"I did it for the Islamic State," he said, according to the complaint.

It said he also told his interrogators that one of his goals in carrying out the attack "was to terrorize as many people as possible."

"He chose to carry out the attack on a workday because he believed that there would be more people," the complaint added.

The Facebook post, published by his account Monday morning, read: "Trump you failed to protect your nation."

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Ullah, while at the hospital, waived his Miranda rights verbally and in writing, the complaint said.

Ullah began to be radicalized by at least 2014, the complaint said, and he viewed Islamic State propaganda online, including a video directing followers to carry out attacks where they were living if they could not join the group's efforts overseas. Using the internet, Ullah began researching how to build explosives about a year ago, the complaint said. Within the past two to three weeks, it said, he began gathering the materials to construct the bomb: a metal pipe which he filled with explosive material he created; screws to pack inside; and Christmas tree lights and a 9-volt battery to spark its detonation. Then, about one week ago, he built the pipe bomb at his apartment in Brooklyn.

Investigators were continuing to delve into the past of Ullah, who is believed to have acted alone and chose the spot in a narrow hallway connecting subway stations beneath Times Square for its Christmas-themed posters.

His device, however, affixed to his torso with plastic zip ties, failed to fully detonate, police said, and Ullah was the only one seriously injured in a blast that sent smoke billowing through the underground passageways of Midtown and snarled a Monday morning commute. Port Authority police officers, who were the first to reach Ullah, found him lying on the ground, injured, the fragments of his partially-detonated device around him and wires connected to the battery in his pants pocket running beneath his jacket

"It didn't function with the force and power that the recipe intended," John J. Miller, the New York Police Department's commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said about the bomb in an interview Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."

Miller said the events could have "been far, far worse."

Ullah used metal screws inside the pipe because, as he told investigators, he believed they would cause "maximum damage," the complaint said.

After his arrest, the complaint said, investigators who searched his residence in Brooklyn recovered, among other things: metal pipes; pieces of wire and fragments of what appeared to be Christmas lights; metal screws similar to those found strewn at the bombing scene; and a passport in Ullah's name with handwritten notes including, "O America, die in your rage."

The charges against Ullah were announced at a news conference Tuesday by Joon H. Kim, acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan; William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the FBI's New York office; and Benjamin B. Tucker, the first deputy police commissioner.

"In the middle of rush hour," Kim said, "as everyday New Yorkers hurried to their jobs, to their schools, ready to start the workweek and get going with their busy lives, one man came to kill, to maim and to destroy."

Kim said that he expected that Ullah, while he was in the hospital, would be given a "bedside presentment" — that is, make an initial appearance before a magistrate judge, possibly via videoconference.

Some of the charges against Ullah, if he were to be convicted, carry maximum sentences of life in prison.

Meanwhile, a fuller portrait of Ullah and his motives was emerging as investigators fanned out across New York to track down every lead. Albert Fox Cahn, legal director of the state's chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, however, said some of law enforcement's tactics had been too aggressive.

Standing outside the apartment building on Ocean Parkway, in Brooklyn, where Ullah lived, Cahn said law enforcement officials had held children as young as 4 out in the cold and pulled a teenager out of classes at his high school to interrogate him without a lawyer or his parents present.

"These are not the sorts of actions we expect from our justice system," Cahn said Monday. "And we have every confidence that our justice system will find the truth behind this attack and that we will, in the end, be able to learn what occurred today."

The FBI's Sweeney, without addressing Cahn's criticism directly, said at the news conference that there were instances after such attacks where the intelligence "may dictate that we locate, detain and interview individuals" to ensure the safety of the public and law enforcement personnel.

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"Our teams use appropriate, reasonable and lawful methods to accomplish these goals," he added, "but to be clear, our teams will move with speed and move with purpose."

Early Tuesday, James Waters, chief of counterterrorism for the Police Department, said in an interview on NY1 that public safety concerns forced investigators to focus intently on Ullah's relatives and associates in the moments after the violence.

"We needed to make sure that this was the only individual involved," he said. "That this was not going to be an attack with multiple players involved."

To that end, investigators also fanned out overseas, with Bangladeshi police officers visiting Ullah's ancestral village at Musapur Union in eastern Bangladesh on Tuesday afternoon, speaking with several of his relatives.

"They stayed here for an hour and wanted to know more about Akayed Ullah," said a cousin named Emdad. "We shared what we know. But police did not find any criminal record against him."

Counterterrorism investigators also brought Ullah's wife in for questioning Tuesday and questioned her parents, with whom she was living in Dhaka, where Ullah was born.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting from New York; AK Mohammed Moinuddin from Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi.

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