Just how big a failure was convicted terrorist and ex-Shelton resident Faisal Shahzad?
Even Osama bin Laden didn’t like his plan to leave a car bomb in Times Square.
The al-Qaeda leader, who has been dead for a year now thanks to U.S. Navy SEALS, thought Shahzad’s attempted attack wasn’t honorable because he had become a U.S. citizen in order to carry it out.
In short — Shahzad wasn’t good for al-Qaeda’s image.
That’s according to a Washington Post article published April 30 on the newspaper’s website.
The article looks at documents recovered at bin Laden’s home after he was killed last year.
Bin Laden, in his missives, displayed an increasingly legalistic interpretation of whether a terrorist act is permissible under sharia,” the Post reported.
“When Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in May 2010, his attempt, widely hailed by jihadists, drew a surprising rebuke from bin Laden, who took a rare break from his self-imposed seclusion in central Pakistan to denounce Shahzad.
It wasn’t the prospect of civilian deaths that upset bin Laden, but rather the fact that Shahzad had planned the act after swearing a loyalty oath to the United States as a newly naturalized citizen.
“You know it is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemy,” bin Laden wrote, according to a copy of his missive obtained by (Seth) Jones, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp.
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Shahzad lived on Long Hill Avenue before traveling Pakistan to receive terrorism training in Waziristan, a lawless section on the country’s border with Afghanistan.
He attempted to plant a Nissan Pathfinder filled with explosives in Times Square on May 1, 2010.
Smoke was spotted coming from the vehicle by several street vendors, but the bomb did not explode. Shahzad was caught two days later on a plane about to depart to Dubai from JFK International Airport.
Shahzad, who lived in the U.S. for a decade as a seemingly normal suburbanite, is serving a life term in a federal prison.