Najibullah Zazi pleads guilty in New York subway bomb plot

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Zazi pleads guilty

Terror suspect Najibullah Zazi has pleaded guilty to three counts of terror charges in a federal court in Brooklyn. Armen Keteyian reports.

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Zazi, now 25, aroused the interest of law enforcement, and he was tracked by teams of FBI agents and police, who stopped his vehicle on a bridge into Manhattan. Justice Department officials said for the first time Monday that Zazi and others had timed their plot to occur in the subway on Sept. 14, 15 or 16, but backed away after realizing that they were under surveillance.

Zazi's arrest marked the first in a wave of alarming incidents involving alleged terrorists who targeted sites in the United States and overseas, including accused Fort Hood army base shooter Nidal M. Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, suspected in the attempted Christmas Day "underwear bombing."

FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole told reporters that the Zazi case and intelligence provided by the defendant have "given us all greater insight into the evolving nature of terrorist activities."

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism analyst at Georgetown University, said the case was in some ways more troubling than the Christmas bombing attempt, in which a Nigerian man is suspected of trying to detonate explosives aboard a transatlantic jetliner bound for Detroit.

In this case, Zazi was a U.S. resident whom core al-Qaeda leaders were able to identify and train and who assembled his own weapons and recruited other U.S. residents to carry out an attack that could have been more chaotic and paralyzing to the nation's largest city than even an explosion aboard an airliner.

Yet, Hoffman added, it remains unclear how U.S. authorities came to suspect Zazi. Did they pick up the plot through a web of improved post-9/11 intelligence collection methods, or did the U.S. government simply stumble across an informant?

"It's a tremendous triumph for the U.S. national security system and justice system that we got him, but the circumstances that led to that, do they reflect that the U.S. is on the right track in counterterrorism, or did we just get lucky?" Hoffman said. "How much of it was skill, and how much of it was luck?"