Prosecutors: Times Square bomber calculated carnage

Painting an even darker picture of Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, federal prosecutors revealed Wednesday that he watched streaming real-time video on the Internet of people walking around the Manhattan landmark to try to pick the time and place to produce maximum carnage.

The government, in a sentencing memorandum filed in federal court in Manhattan, also said that Shahzad told investigators that he had calculated his May 1 car bomb would probably kill at least 40 people, and said he planned to detonate a second bomb two weeks later if he wasn't caught.

The memorandum, calling on U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum to sentence Shahzad next week to life in prison, quoted extensively from a 40-minute martyrdom tape Shahzad recorded in Pakistan before returning to the United States to try to launch the attack.

"I have been trying to join my brothers in jihad ever since 9/11 happened," Shahzad says on the video, parts of which were publicized in July. "I am planning to wage an attack inside America."

Shahzad, 30, a Pakistani-born naturalized citizen from Bridgeport, Conn., was arrested two days after his bomb attempt in Times Square, where explosives packed into his Nissan Pathfinder failed to ignite.

The government's claims were consistent with Shahzad's portrayal of himself at his guilty plea on June 21. He described himself as a remorseless "Muslim soldier" working on behalf of the Pakistani Taliban and said he planned the attack to achieve maximum casualties in revenge for U.S. killing of civilians.

Prosecutors attached to their sentencing memo a copy of Shahzad's jihad video, recorded six months before the attack, and a video showing a "re-enactment" of Shahzad's car bomb, staged by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Investigators reconstructed the bomb - including the primary components of fertilizer, propane and gasoline - and placed it in an SUV in proximity to other vehicles at a staging area. The controlled detonation demonstrated that the effects in Times Square would have been "devastating," prosecutors said.

Although a life sentence for Shahzad is almost a foregone conclusion, the government said it was justified in part because of his ingratitude to his adopted country, which he turned on after getting an education and a job here, and living in a Bridgeport suburb with his wife and children.

"Notwithstanding this series of opportunities and accomplishments . . . Shahzad knowingly and deliberately chose a different path - a nihilistic path that celebrated conflict and death cloaked in the rhetoric of a distorted interpretation of Islam," prosecutors wrote.

They also told Cedarbaum that so-called "homegrown terrorists" like Shahzad, who have knowledge of the United States and can fit in, are an acute and growing danger.

"There are few threats to the national security and the way of life in this country greater than a citizen who chooses to serve as an operative for a foreign terrorist organization and attempts to wage an attack inside the United States," prosecutors said.

A lawyer for Shahzad did not return a call for comment Wednesday. His sentencing is scheduled for Tuesday.