Faisal Shahzad sentenced to life in Times Square bomb plot
This undated photo shows Credit: APFaisal Shahzad, the man accused of plotting a car bombing in New York City's Times Square. Shahzad made his first court appearance Tuesday.
The man who plotted to kill Americans by driving a homemade car bomb into Times Square and leaving it to explode has been sentenced to life in prison.
A judge gave Faisal Shahzad a mandatory life prison term at his sentencing Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. The bomb he had packed into the back of an SUV sputtered, and no one was injured in a Times Square packed with tourists.
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The man who plotted to kill Americans by driving a homemade car bomb into Times Square and leaving it to explode has been sentenced to life in prison.
A judge gave Faisal Shahzad a mandatory life prison term at his sentencing Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. The bomb he had packed into the back of an SUV sputtered, and no one was injured in a Times Square packed with tourists.
Calling himself a Muslim solider, a defiant Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts.
Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalized citizen who is a former budget analyst from Bridgeport, Conn., was arrested two days after his May 1 attempted bombing.
Tuesday, he told the judge a defeat of the United States is imminent.
Shahzad appeared before U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, the same jurist who engaged him in a lively back-and-forth in June when Shahzad pleaded guilty and described himself as a proud "Muslim soldier."
Shahzad faced a mandatory life sentence when he pleaded guilty to a 10-count indictment in June, and additional mandatory minimums of 5 years each on six other counts. Prosecutors wanted the life sentence sandwiched among consecutive sentences totaling 105 years.
At his guilty plea, Shahzad took the opportunity to deliver a lecture - explaining that he wanted to kill Americans because of civilian casualties among Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cedarbaum asked Shahzad why tourists walking around in Times Square should pay the price for military casualties oveseas.
When he said he didn't distinguish between a government and its people, she said, "Including the children?"
Shahzad tried to detonate a bomb in his Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square, but it didn't work. Captured two days later, he confessed, and said he had been sent on his mission by the Pakistani Taliban.
He pleaded guilty in June without any plea agreement. He is likely to serve his sentence at a federal prison in Florence, Colo., where other notorious terror prisoners such as Ramzi Yousef, al-Qaida mastermind of the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are held.