New York: Officials say they have thwarted an Islamic State terror plot to blow up the New York State legislature building in Albany and arrested a Muslim convert.
After her arrest on Thursday, Jessica Bowie, 35, was charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organisation and produced in a federal court in Albany, the state capital of New York.
A federal magistrate remanded her to custody.
In the complaint filed against her, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said that Bowie, who adopted the “Kuniya” or honorific Islamic name, Aisha Saif, after her conversion five years ago, expressed support for the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists in 2001 in social media posts.
She also made several other anti-US statements and expressed support for terrorist organisations.
An FBI informant contacted her, and she expressed interest in carrying out a terrorist attack, according to the court filing.
Bowie allegedly told him, “Blowing kafirs’ brains out is beautiful”.
To prove her bona fides, she said that she had completed the “bayah”, the traditional Islamic oath of allegiance, to the ” Commander of the Faithful and the Caliph of the Muslims, the Mujahid Shairkh Abu Hafa al-Hashimi al-Quraishi”.
He is the head of the Islamic State terror organisation.
She scouted several buildings in Albany, including the governor’s office, before settling on the Capitol, the building housing the state legislature, according to the complaint.
The informant introduced her to two other informants, who pretended to support her cause and offered to help her.
She allegedly told them she wanted to “destroy as much of the building as possible and kill the (state) senators while they are meeting”.
She said for the risk she was taking, she did not want to kill one or two people but create greater damage.
FBI Special Agent Craig Tremaroli told reporters she “didn’t just want to kill lawmakers; she wanted a destruction of our government”.
Bowie told the informants that she would like to escape after the attack and take a plane out of the country, although she was not sure it could be done, according to the complaint.
She threatened that she would come back and carry out more attacks, like one on New Year’s Eve celebration at Times Square, and while she wanted to attack the White House, she thought it would be harder, the complaint said.
Planning the attack, she said that the explosive would be smuggled in as a food delivery and had procured a bag from a food delivery service.
After she bought the material that the informants said they needed to make the bomb, they fabricated a dud explosive, which they gave her along with a fake gun on Wednesday.
She was arrested on Thursday near the Capitol.
This was the second case in just over a month of a woman being arrested in New York State for allegedly being involved with Islamic terror organisations.
In Irondequoit, a town near the Canada border, Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, was arrested late June on charges of sending $30,116 in cryptocurrency to support the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation (DAMPL), which the US considers a terrorist organisation, according to the Justice Department.
(IANS)
