A man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square spent a decade on the path to respectability before embarking on explosives training in Pakistan, authorities have revealed.
Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old son of a retired official in Pakistan's air force, has been charged with trying to blow up a crude petrol and propane device inside a parked sport utility vehicle amid tourists and Broadway theatre-goers.
He is in custody after being hauled off a Dubai-bound plane he had boarded on Monday night at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport, despite being under surveillance and placed on the federal no-fly list.
US Attorney General Eric Holder said Shahzad had been providing valuable information to investigators as they sought to determine the scope of the plot to blow up the vehicle on Saturday night in the heart of Times Square.
"Based on what we know so far, it is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country," Holder said.
A court hearing was cancelled on Tuesday in part because of Shahzad's continuing co-operation with investigators, but authorities said they had shed little light on what might have motivated him.
Until recently, his life in the US appeared enviable. He had a master's degree from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a job as a budget analyst for a marketing firm in Norwalk, Connecticut, two children and a well-educated wife who posted his smiling picture and lovingly called him "my everything" on a social networking website.
But shortly after becoming a US citizen a year ago, he gave up his job, stopped paying his mortgage and told a real estate agent to let the bank take the house because he was returning to Pakistan. According to investigators, he travelled to the lawless Waziristan region and learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.
In court papers, investigators said Shahzad returned to the US on February 3, moved into an apartment in a low-rent section of Bridgeport, then set about acquiring materials and a car he bought with cash in late April. They said that after his arrest, Shahzad confessed to rigging the bomb and driving it into Times Square. He also acknowledged getting training in Pakistan, the filing said.
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Kifyat Ali, a cousin of Shahzad's father, spoke to reporters outside the family's home in Peshawar, Pakistan and said they had yet to be officially informed of Shahzad's arrest, which he called "a conspiracy so the (Americans) can bomb more Pashtuns," a major ethnic group in Peshawar and the nearby tribal areas of Pakistan and south-west Afghanistan.
