Subway Suicide Bombing Plot

In the early morning hours of July 31, 1997, police, acting on a tip, raided a Brooklyn, New York, apartment, capturing two Palestinian men who were allegedly planning an attack on the Atlantic Avenue subway and Long Island Rail Road stations.

At 10:45 p.m. on July 29, 1997, Abdel Rahman Rosabbah, a recent immigrant from Egypt, approached two Long Island Rail Road police officers and tried to explain, in broken English, that friends of his were plotting to kill people on the subway. When officers heard the word “bomb,” they brought Rosabbah to the 88th Precinct, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Just over 24 hours later, at approximately 4:30 a.m. on July 31, members of New York's Emergency Services Unit stormed into a shabby two-floor apartment building on 4th Avenue, near the Gowanus section of Park Slope. When the officers entered a bedroom, 24-year-old Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar tried to detonate a nearby pipe bomb. Before the bomb could be fully armed, an officer shot him twice in the leg. Another man, Lafi Khalil, who allegedly reached for an officer's gun, was shot five times before being subdued. Both were taken to the hospital. The bombs in the apartment, which were fashioned from four lengths of pipe, were dismantled and taken to the police range in Rodman's Neck, in the Bronx. (Investigators suggested that the bombs could have killed anyone within a 25-foot radius.) Police also found anti-Semitic materials, bomb-making instructions, immigration papers for Abu Maizar, which stated he was accused of being a terrorist in Israel and that he was seeking political asylum, as well as what was deemed an unsigned suicide note. The note called for the release of several jailed Islamic militants, including Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil, who were about to go on trial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as well as the jailed cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Police also found detonators and harnesses, but no timing device. The bomb was designed to detonate when its four switches were flipped. All evidence indicted that a suicide bombing was planned.

Initially, investigators looked for links between the two men and other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. The arrests came two days after a double suicide bombing in Jerusalem, for which the militant Islamic organization Hamas claimed responsibility. Hamas denied any connection with the two men, however, stating that their enemies were Israeli Zionists, not Americans. One of the men, Lafi Khalil, had the name of a known member of a terrorist organization in his address book, but no links were ever discovered.

Abu Maizar and Khalil were both arraigned in their hospital beds. On August 19, 1997, they were indicted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges. A year later, during the opening remarks of the trial, Abu Maizar's defense claimed that he and his associates were actually trying to defraud the government of reward money offered by the State Department for information related to terrorist bombings, not kill innocent people. A copy of the “suicide note” that had been mailed to the State Department on July 29 was the defense's main evidence. However, Abu Maizar later testified that he planned to kill as many Jews as possible in a suicide [Page 563]attack—but not on a subway. He also claimed that Khalil knew nothing of the planned attack.

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