Najibullah Zazi admitted plotting an attack on the New York City subway with two friends, and then testified against them. Now he is behind bars after putting money in their prison accounts.
A man who plotted a terror attack on the New York City subway system with his best friends before testifying against them is again incarcerated after sending them a few hundred dollars in prison, according to his lawyer.
The man, Najibullah Zazi, was originally arrested in 2009 for hatching the plan with two high school classmates from Flushing, Queens. He pleaded guilty, provided information to the U.S. authorities about Al Qaeda and testified at two federal trials. He earned praise from prosecutors for rejecting extremism and, ultimately, received a sentence that reflected his cooperation.
But in May, Mr. Zazi, now 40, was arrested in North Carolina and appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, where he was accused of violating the terms of his release, including by making unauthorized contact with a terrorist organization.
Thomas Nooter, Mr. Zazi's lawyer, said on Saturday that the charges were based on four payments, totaling several hundred dollars, sent anonymously to the prison commissary accounts of his friends and former co-conspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin.
The payments, sent in March, were part of Mr. Zazi's annual religious charitable giving to the poor, or zakat, Mr. Nooter said. But Mr. Zazi is now accused of communicating with "individuals or organizations that are affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations." He pleaded not guilty.
It is not clear how prosecutors discovered that Mr. Zazi, who had been living in North Carolina, was the source of the payments, or whether they were his first. Mr. Zazi has also been accused of failing to report his contact with local law enforcement after an incident in which a storage unit he had rented was burglarized, Mr. Nooter said.
Magistrate Judge Lara K. Eshkenazi ordered Mr. Zazi detained on May 29. He is scheduled to return to court in October. In the meantime, prosecutors are sifting through "many gigabytes of data" from two phones and a computer belonging to Mr. Zazi, Nick Moscow, a federal prosecutor, said on Sept. 9 in court.
Mr. Zazi is being held at Essex County Jail in Newark, his lawyer said. He is not a U.S. citizen, and he could face deportation depending on the outcome of the current charges because of the seriousness of his prior conviction.
His arrest, which has not been previously reported, again upended the life of a man who once trained with Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and whose extensive cooperation with law enforcement authorities was instrumental to U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
He provided information about the group's operations and about friends and family members that prosecutors said led to charges against other people. In return, he was sentenced in 2019 to 10 years in prison, effectively the time he had already served.
Mr. Zazi was born in a small village in Afghanistan and immigrated to Queens with his family as a boy. His father drove a cab, and as a young man, Mr. Zazi was known as the affable operator of a Lower Manhattan coffee cart that featured a sign reading "God Bless America."
But at some point, he lost his way. In 2006, he fell under the sway of an extremist Muslim cleric and started to make regular trips to Pakistan, where he married.
In August 2008, according to court papers, he flew to Pakistan with Mr. Ahmedzay and Mr. Medunjanin and joined the Taliban insurgency against the United States in Afghanistan. (A lawyer for Mr. Medunjanin declined to comment, and a lawyer for Mr. Ahmedzay did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Together, the three men took an oath to fight alongside the Taliban and kill American soldiers, according to court papers. At one training camp, Mr. Zazi said, he and his friends received weapons training and instruction in how to make and use explosives from Qaeda operatives. At another, they learned how to make bombs using ingredients like nail polish remover and hydrogen peroxide.
In 2009, Mr. Zazi returned from Pakistan and moved to Colorado, where he worked as an airport shuttle driver and started to buy chemicals for bombs, including at beauty supply stores. With the goal of carrying out an attack around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, he drove across the country to New York with explosives in September 2009.
Prosecutors have said the plot posed one of the gravest threats to the United States since the 2001 attacks.
After being stopped on the George Washington Bridge, Mr. Zazi became nervous that he was under surveillance and abandoned the mission. It turned out he was right. He had come under federal scrutiny that summer, and his road trip had set off frenzied activity among law enforcement authorities across the country.
He flew back to Colorado where he was arrested on Sept. 19, 2009, and charged with making false statements. A week later, he was charged with conspiring to detonate explosives.
After his arrest, Mr. Zazi testified against or informed on several other defendants, including his friends, Mr. Ahmedzay and Mr. Medunjanin, as well as a man who was convicted of planning to bomb a shopping center in England and another who plotted to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan.
His testimony also wound up helping to send his own father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, to prison. The elder Mr. Zazi, who had tried to protect his son from federal investigators in 2009, was convicted of obstructing justice. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2012.
Before his own sentencing in 2019, Najibullah Zazi wrote a letter to Judge Raymond J. Dearie in which he said that he had been "gullible" for believing a corrupted version of Islamic teachings and that the "uneducated are perfect targets for the unscrupulous."
"I tried my best to correct my horrific mistake by cooperating," Mr. Zazi said in a statement before his sentencing. "I have a deeper knowledge of myself and understanding of the true meaning of Islam."
Judge Dearie told him: "This once unthinkable second chance has come your way. And you have earned it."