Najibullah Zazi

Najibullah Zazi (Arabic: نجيب الله زازي) (born August 10, 1985) is an Afghan-American who was arrested in September 2009 as part of the 2009 U.S. al Qaeda group accused of planning suicide bombings on the New York City Subway system, and who pleaded guilty as have two other defendants.

U.S. prosecutors said Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaeda's head of external operations, and Rashid Rauf, an al-Qaeda operative, ordered the attack.

Both were later killed in drone attacks.

At the age of seven in 1992, he and his family moved to the city of Peshawar in Pakistan where they settled as Afghan refugees.

In 1999, he and the family left Pakistan and immigrated to New York City.

They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Flushing, Queens section of the city.

Mohammed Wali Zazi, Najibullah's father and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, found work as a New York City taxi driver.

From 1999–2009, Zazi lived with his family in Flushing.

While he was a teenager, he and his family lived in the same apartment building as, and attended the same mosque, the Afghan Hazrat-i-Abu Bakr Sadiq mosque,as did its imam, Saifur Rahman Halimi.

Halimi was a vocal pro-global jihad imam.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder referred to the planned attack as "one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since September 11, 2001."

Zazi was born in a village in Paktia Province, Afghanistan.

He has two sisters and two brothers.

He was chief representative to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord who was declared a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" by the U.S. in 2003.

Halimi and the Zazi family, among others, left the mosque at the same time, during a leadership disagreement.

According to one of his friends, Zazi liked listening to Zakir Naik, an Indian Muslim televangelist who is an expert on comparative religion and theology.

Zazi struggled as a student at Flushing High School in Queens, eventually dropping out.

From 2004–09, he operated a coffee and pastries vending cart on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan's Financial District., displaying a "God Bless America" sign on his cart.

In 2006, he traveled to Pakistan and married his 19-year-old cousin in an arranged marriage.

He claimed that several trips he made to Pakistan between 2006 and 2008 were to visit his wife.

In the course of his visits, Zazi and his wife had two children, whom he planned to relocate to the U.S.

Zazi underwent weapons and explosives training at an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan in 2008.

On August 28, 2008, Zazi and others flew from New York to Peshawar, Pakistan, a city just east of Pakistan's volatile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (the FATA).

The Center for Strategic and International Studies describes the FATA as:

"ground zero in the U.S. Jihadist war, and home to many al-Qaeda operatives, especially the numerous foreigners from the Arab world, Central Asia Muslim areas of the Far East, and even Europe who flock to this war zone for training [and] indoctrination."

While there, they were recruited by al-Qaeda instead, and taken to a training camp in Waziristan, where they received training on several kinds of weapons.

Al-Qaeda leaders asked them to return to the U.S. and conduct a suicide bombing martyrdom operation, and they agreed to do so.

Later, he received additional training at the camp on explosives construction for an attack in the U.S., or to carry out a martyrdom operation.

He took lengthy notes and emailed them to himself, so he could access them upon his return to the U.S. Al-Qaeda leaders also discussed target locations with Zazi, such as New York City subways.

He gave money and computers to al-Qaeda before leaving Pakistan.

Zazi met American Bryant Neal Vinas in Pakistan in 2008.

On September 9, 2009, he drove from his home in Aurora, Colorado, to New York City, intending to detonate explosives on the New York City subway during rush hour as one of three coordinated suicide "martyrdom" bombings.

Spooked, however, by surveillance from U.S. intelligence, and warned by a local imam that the authorities were inquiring about him, he abruptly flew back to Colorado.

He was arrested days later.

On February 22, 2010, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiring to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

He said he was recruited by al-Qaeda in Pakistan for a suicide "martyrdom" attack against the U.S., and that his bombing target was the New York City subway system.

Zazi faced a possible life sentence without possibility of parole for the first two counts, and an additional sentence of 15 years for the third count.

Sentencing was initially scheduled to take in June 2011.

In May 2019, it was announced Zazi would be released from prison after serving 10 years due to extensive cooperation with law enforcement.

Two of his high school classmates who had traveled with him to Pakistan, his father, his uncle, and an imam from Queens were indicted on related charges.