The Sunday Read: ‘The “Herald Square Bomber” Who Wasn’t’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In summer 2003, Shahawar Matin Siraj, then 21, met Osama Eldawoody, a nuclear engineer twice his age. To Mr. Siraj’s delight they struck up an unlikely friendship — never before had someone this sophisticated taken him so seriously. At the older man’s encouragement, Mr. Siraj became entangled in a plot to place a bomb in Herald Square subway station. He would later want out of the plan, but it was too late: Mr. Eldawoody, it turned out, was one of thousands of informants recruited by the police and the F.B.I. after the Sept. 11 attacks. Today on The Sunday Read, did the U.S. government’s network of informants create plots where none existed?

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's late August 2004 when three men show up to the Hell Square subway station in Manhattan.
0:06.6	Shaharim Medin Suraj is 21.
0:09.2	He was driven there by Osama Al-Dhubudi, a man more than twice as age, a sort of mentor
0:14.4	and father figure.
0:16.8	Suraj and another man walk through the station while Al-Dhubudi stays behind in his car.
0:22.4	And when they return, Al-Dhubudi asks them to draw maps of what they saw, and then he
0:27.3	keeps the drawings.
0:29.4	A few days later, Suraj is in Al-Dhubudi's car again.
0:33.4	This time, Al-Dhubudi gives him a backpack and tells him,
0:37.0	the bomb that you will use to attack Harold Square will go in here.
0:42.4	Suraj was already scared.
0:44.4	He tries to back out of the plan, but Al-Dhubudi insists.
0:49.7	Four days pass, and Suraj gets a call at work to come down to the local police precinct
0:54.0	in Brooklyn.
0:55.8	He starts walking the few blocks to the station.
0:59.4	Suddenly, he's surrounded by three and marked cars and handcuffed, a gun pointed at his
1:03.6	head.
1:05.6	Eventually authorities tell Suraj, he's being arrested for conspiring to blow up Harold
1:10.0	Square.
1:11.3	And the reason they know this is that Al-Dhubudi, the other man in the car, the man Suraj
1:17.2	thought was his friend, is a paid NYPD informant.
1:22.9	I'm Rosina Ali, an AMA contributor to the New York Times magazine.
	...

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