Faisal Shahzad is of Kashmiri descent & the Son of a Former Air Vice Marshal

Faisal Shahzad left many clues which helped authorities trace his whereabouts quickly.

The keys found in the ignition of the sport utility vehicle (SUV) that was left to explode in Times Square on May 1 evening did more than just start the car: one opened the front door to Shahzad’s home.

The woman in Bridgeport who in April sold Shahzad the rusting 1993 Nissan Pathfinder did not remember his name. But she had his telephone number. That number was traced back to a prepaid cellular phone purchased by Shahzad, one that received four calls from Pakistan in the hours before he bought the SUV.

It was 53 hours and 20 minutes from the moment the authorities say Shahzad left his failed car bomb in the heart of Manhattan until the moment he was taken off a plane at Kennedy Airport and charged with trying to kill untold numbers of the city’s residents and tourists.

At 6:28pm on May 1, Shahzad steered his newly acquired Pathfinder on West 45th Street, in Times Square, a move caught on film by a police security camera as it crossed Broadway. He bailed out seconds later. Then a street vendor — wearing an ‘I love NewYork’ T-shirt — waved down a mounted officer, who saw the white smoke collecting inside the still idling vehicle and made a call that got the bomb squad there by about 7pm.

It took the bomb squad eight hours of work simply to render the SUV safe enough to approach. After that was done, officials found keys hanging from the ignition. Hours later, after they towed the car to a Queens forensic garage, they found an even more important clue when a police Auto Crime Unit detective crawled underneath the vehicle.

The break in the case took place when a New York City detective was able to go under the vehicle and get the hidden VIN number. This identified the owner of record, who in turn sold it to the suspect.

And soon, investigators fanned out to find the driver.

All May 2 afternoon, the agents and police searched for the Pathfinder’s owner of record — a man they knew had bought it used from a lot in Connecticut. By 6pm, they found the man in Bridgeport. He said it was his daughter they needed. “I give it to her,” the man, Lagnes Colas, said in an interview, noting that she had decided to sell it recently so she could get a better car. Within 20 minutes, the investigators were talking with his daughter, Peggy. She said she met on April 24 a man who answered her online advertisements. He bargained the price down to $1,300 from $1,800, she told investigators.

He paid with $100 bills. He looked Middle Eastern or Hispanic. And it was, investigators learned, a strange transaction: one conducted in a supermarket parking lot, without paperwork or receipts, and involving a man who explained that a bill of sale was unnecessary and who appeared uninterested in the vehicle’s long-term prospects.

Shahzad inspected the interior seating and cargo area but not the engine. He was told the chassis was not in good shape, but he bought it anyway.“I thought maybe he might bring the car back,” Mr Colas said.

The investigative trail was warming up.

Later on May 2, a sketch artist was brought in from the Connecticut State Police to work with Ms Colas on a portrait of the man who had bought the SUV. The work was promising.

On May 3, police and federal agents were back. Now they had photographs of six men. She picked out the one of Shahzad.

Meanwhile, officials dug through Verizon Wireless records to learn more about the number she provided, one they found was attached to a prepaid phone activated on April 16.

Though they declined to say precisely how they had tracked such an anonymous number, they established not only that Shahzad was the buyer of the Pathfinder, but also that he got four phone calls from a Pakistani number associated with him during the hour before he made his final calls to arrange the purchase of the vehicle. 

Faisal Shahzad became an American citizen after emigrating from Pakistan, where he came from a wealthy family. He earned an MBA. He had a well-educated wife and two children and owned a house in a middle-class Connecticut suburb.

He left a job at a global marketing firm he’d held for three years, lost his home to foreclosure and moved into an apartment in an impoverished neighbourhood in Bridgeport.

Shahzad’s behaviour sometimes seemed odd to his neighbours, and he surprised a real estate broker he hardly knew with his outspokenness about President Bush and the Iraq war.

“He mentioned that he didn’t like Bush policies in Iraq,” said Igor Djuric, who represented Shahzad in 2004 when he was buying a home.

Mr Djuric said he couldn’t remember the exact words Shahzad used about Mr Bush but “something to the effect of he doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s the wrong thing that he’s doing.”

“I don’t know if he mentioned 9/11,” Mr Djuric said, “but something like that, Iraq has nothing to do with anything.”

Shahzad came to the United States in late 1998 on a student visa. He took classes at the now-defunct Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., then enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer applications and information systems in 2000.

“He was personable, a nice guy, but unremarkable,” said William Greenspan, adviser for undergraduate business students at the University of Bridgeport. “He would just come in and take the course as needed so he could graduate in a timely manner.” “If this didn’t happen, I probably would have forgotten him,” Mr Greenspan said. “He didn’t stand out.”

Shahzad was granted an H1-B visa for skilled workers in 2002. He later returned to the University of Bridgeport to earn a master’s in business administration, awarded in 2005.

In 2004, he and his wife, Huma Mian, bought a newly built home for $273,000 at the height of the market in Shelton, a Fairfield County town that in recent years has attracted companies relocating to Connecticut’s Gold Coast. 

His family has left its ancestral home in the village of Mohib Banda near Peshawar ostensibly for fear of media intrusion. The family’s residence in Peshawar’s Hayatabad area was also locked.

There was no trace of Faisal Shahzad’s father Baharul Haq, a retired air vice-marshal, or other members of the family. Some family friends claimed that they too knew nothing about them.

“I have not received any call from Mr Haq since the news of the arrest of Faisal reached us,” said a former union council nazim, who said he had been on good terms with him. Another family friend said almost similar things. “We are now worried about them. I don’t know where they are,” said Advocate Kifayat Ali Khan who hails from the same village. Faiz Ahmad said he had seen Shahzad about one and a half years ago at his father’s place. He claimed he and Mr Haq shared the interest in tracing the origins of Mohib Baba after whom the village was named. “We don’t have any seminary here and people are mostly enlightened,” Mr Ahmad said. He said Shahzad had shifted to Karachi a few years ago. “Last time he visited Peshawar he appeared a little different. He was sporting beard and was reserved and quiet.” Mr Ahmad said that if Shahzad had become an extremist he might have come under the influence of some elements in Karachi.

Mr Haq himself left the village years ago and his nephew Sareerul Haq lives in the house. “Following visits by media vehicles late on Tuesday night, Sareer locked the house and went to some other place,” said Naveed Khan who runs a grocery shop in the village.

The Times Square car bomb failed to detonate, but it could yet cause political reverberations around two questions:

Should the government have known about the plot and its alleged perpetrator?

And does using the rules of the criminal-justice system against a man accused of plotting a terror attack against America leave the country more vulnerable?

And questions have been raised over how Faisal Shahzad managed to board the Dubai-bound flight on which he was arrested shortly before takeoff May 4, 2010 at JFK International Airport despite being under surveillance by the FBI.

The criminal complaint against Shahzad alleges that he received bombmaking training in a militant camp in western Pakistan. Still, the suspect appears not to have previously registered on the radar of the U.S. security bureaucracy through any known association with terrorist or radical groups.

Pakistani government officials said on May 4 that Shahzad is of Kashmiri descent and the son of a former top Pakistani air-force officer. On his most recent Pakistani passport application, he had given his nationality as Kashmiri — a fact that some analysts suspect might tie him to militant groups based in Pakistan originally formed to fight Indian control of the divided territory. An official in Islamabad said Pakistani authorities are investigating whether he had ties to any Kashmiri jihadist groups.

During his latest spell in Pakistan, Shahzad was also said to have spent significant time in Peshawar.

A Pakistani government source said that the suspect had had ties with militants while in Pakistan. “He was here at a training camp,” the source said. The legal complaint against Shahzad, which charged him with terrorism and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, said he admitted to receiving bombmaking training in Waziristan, the lawless tribal hotbed of militancy. Pakistani officials claim that there have been a number of arrests in Karachi of people suspected by authorities of having a connection with the suspect.

But so far, the only indication that Shahzad had raised any suspicion among U.S. officials is the fact that he underwent secondary screening at the airport upon his return to the U.S. earlier this year. According to Congresswoman Jane Harman, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Shahzad was pulled aside and gave “critical contact information that was entered into the system and used in his arrest yesterday.”

At a press conference in Washington Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Shahzad had been screened “because some of the targeting rules applied,” but declined to elaborate. At the same press conference, FBI deputy director John Pistole said, “There are a number of steps that are taken to identify potential terrorists, whether that’s the country from which they originate, in terms of terrorist training camps, or the individuals they associate with.” The fact that he appears to have briefly evaded surveillance to buy a ticket and board a flight out of the country also raised concern among legislators, although Attorney General Eric Holder insists there was never any danger of Shahzad slipping through the net.

Despite the allegation that he trained in Waziristan, Shahzad can’t have been any jihadist professor’s star student: the bomb contraption he is alleged to have built was so dysfunctional that it could have illustrated a how-not-to-build-a-bomb manual. Perhaps the good news is that jihadist training may have deteriorated as networks based in Afghanistan and Pakistan have come under sustained attack from the U.S. and its allies.

More distressingly, the case could highlight a downside of the U.S.-led war against terrorism since 9/11: while wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and drone strikes in Pakistan — have killed hundreds of militants, those who survive tend to operate more independently, and there are plenty more willing to join them.

“We haven’t bent their determination one bit, but these are smaller, lower-quality efforts,” says a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. “We have managed to break up their capability to conduct large-scale, centrally directed operations,” he adds. “Clearly there’s a quality-control problem. So they’re exhorting violence by locals, to do whatever they can, wherever they are.” Instead of 9/11-style attacks carried out under direct orders from Osama bin Laden and lieutenants, recent efforts have been attempted by more amateurish lone wolves.

And Americans should not take too much comfort from the ineptitude of the Times Square bombmaker. “If Major Nidal Hasan had jumped up on the desk at Fort Hood and shouted ‘Allahu akbar‘ and his guns jammed, he would have looked like a buffoon,” says a retired Army officer who writes often about terrorism. “But his guns didn’t jam. This guy didn’t get it right — he didn’t know how to do bombs — but the next guy might know how to do bombs.”

Shahzad’s treatment after his arrest is also becoming controversial.

At May 4 press conference, Pistole said that “Joint Terrorism Task Force agents and officers from NYPD interviewed Mr. Shahzad last night and early this morning under the public-safety exception to the Miranda rule. He was, as the Attorney General noted, cooperative, and provided valuable intelligence and evidence. He was eventually transported to another location, Mirandized and continued talking.”

Before hearing that Shahzad had been read his rights, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said, “I don’t believe people like Shahzad should be given Miranda rights … in case he gets lawyered up and doesn’t give any information. We need information to know how this thing happened.” Peter King, the senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Attorney General should discuss reading Shahzad his rights with the intelligence community before doing so.

As details of the arrest began to emerge, legislators from both parties were effusive in their praise for the efforts of the U.S. law-enforcement community

But the controversy over Mirandizing terror suspects is unlikely to go away: Connecticut independent Senator Joe Lieberman announced that he plans to propose a bill stripping the citizenship of those Americans deemed by the U.S. intelligence community to have joined foreign terror networks. Presumably the Shahzad case, as it unfolds, will feature in that debate on Capitol Hill.