By Jon Schuppe and Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producers
MANHATTAN — Failed Times Square car-bomber Faisal Shahzad told authorities he would have planned a second bomb if if his device had worked May 1 and he hadn’t been caught, according to newly released court document.
The document, filed Wednesday by prosecutors in Manhattan Federal Court, outlines the government’s case against Shahzad in anticipation of his Oct. 5 sentencing. Prosecutors want him to receive life in prison.
Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to all ten charges against him and cooperated with authorities, who did not offer him any leniency.
The new memo describes how Shahzad, a 30-year old married father of two who used to work as a financial analyst, traveled to Pakistan in 2009 to learn how to make and detonate a bomb. A friend introduced him to the Tehrik-e-Taliban, a militant extremist group that has been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. He lived with the group for 40 days near the Afghanistan border, where members gave him advice and about $5,000 to get started.
During his stay, Shahzad appeared in a video about his planned attack. It was called, "A brave effort by Faisal Shahzad to attack United States in its own Land," according to the government’s memo.
"I am planning to wage an attack inside America," he is quoted as saying on the video. In an appeal to fellow Muslims, he added, "Get up and learn from me and make an effort."
When he returned to his home in Connecticut, Shahzad rented an apartment and bought ingredients for his bomb, including fertilizer, propane, gasoline and fireworks. He also received $12,000 wired by Tehrik-e-Taliban. Then he bought a used Nissan Pathfinder to carry out the attack.
Shahzad cased his target by watching real-time Internet videos of Times Square. Shahzad told authorities he wanted to pick a time when pedestrian traffic was heavy.
Finally, on May 1, Shahzad drove the Pathfinder an hour to Times Square and parked it at the southwest corner of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue. He lit a fuse and walked to Grand Central terminal, listening for an explosion. But the bomb fizzled and it was spotted by a street vendor, who alerted police.
Two days later, Shahzad was arrested after boarding a flight to Pakistan at JFK Airport.
A second video, which was released by the FBI, shows the impact the bomb in Shahzad's car could have caused had it detonated successfully. In the video, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) detonates a bomb identical to the one Shahzad used in a Pathfinder identical to his in a recreation from June.
"While it is impossible to calculate precisely the impact of Shahzad’s bomb had it detonated, the controlled detonation conducted by the JTTF demonstrated that those effects would have been devastating to the surrounding area," the memo read.
The prosecutors ended their memo by saying that if Shahzad’s plot had succeeded, "the lives of numerous residents and visitors of the city would have been lost and countless other would have been forever traumatized."
