(AP) A Bangladeshi immigrant who set off a pipe bomb attached to his chest in New York City’s busiest subway station should spend the rest of his life behind bars for a “premeditated and vicious” terror attack committed on behalf of Islamic State group, prosecutors said Thursday.
In papers filed in federal court in Manhattan, the government argued that Akayed Ullah has never taken proper responsibility for the December 2017 attempted suicide bombing in a pedestrian tunnel beneath Times Square and the Port Authority bus terminal.
After growing angry at American foreign policy in the Middle East, Ullah grew consumed by online Islamic State propaganda “glorifying brutally violent stabbings, shootings, and bombings targeting Americans,” prosecutors told a judge in a sentencing memo. “He ultimately answered ISIS’s call for its supporters to carry out ‘lone-wolf’ terrorist attacks in the United States. Ullah’s attack was premeditated and vicious.”
