New York — Bangladeshi immigrant serves rightly Life imprisonment He is accused of the 2017 subway bombing under New York City’s Times Square, a federal appeals panel said Tuesday, while overturning his conviction for providing material support to the Islamic State extremist group.
The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said Akayedullah was appropriately sentenced to life in prison in 2021 for the planned suicide attack that largely failed when an explosive device strapped to Allah’s chest barely exploded.
The Manhattan-based Second Circuit found that the separate charge of providing material support to ISIS required that Allah act under the control of the terrorist group even though he was acting alone. A three-judge panel left intact the other charges supporting his life sentence.
The appeals court said the group could not receive guidance from God “if it was acting alone, if ISIS did not know of its existence, had no expectation that it would hear or act on ISIS messages, and would not know, care, or have any recourse if it completely ignored the message.”
She added that the fact that God “portrayed himself as an ISIS soldier does not prove that ISIS was in fact controlling or directing his actions.”
In disagreement, Judge Stephen J. Menashe He said it was not surprising that Allah was found guilty by a jury of providing material support to the terrorist group when the evidence they saw included Allah’s statement to investigators that he “did it on behalf of ISIS.”
However, Menashe noted that two of the three 2nd Circuit judges concluded that he acted “entirely independently” of ISIS.
“This is wrong,” he wrote. “To reach the opposite conclusion, the majority rewrites material support law and ignores the evidence presented to the jury.”
Allah’s lawyer and the prosecution spokesman declined to comment.
At his sentencing in April 2021, God asked for leniency.
“Your Honor, what I did on December 11 was wrong,” he said. “I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, I am deeply sorry… I do not support harming innocent people.”
Judge Richard J. Sullivan, who now works for the 2nd Circuit, said at sentencing that life imprisonment was appropriate.
“It was a truly barbaric and heinous crime,” Sullivan said.
The attack, which occurred in a pedestrian tunnel beneath Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, left Allah with serious burns, but saved some nearby pedestrians from more serious injuries, although the government noted that one bystander lost 70% of his hearing.
Hours after Abdullah’s attempted bombing, President Donald Trump mocked the immigration system that allowed Abdullah — and many other law-abiding Bangladeshis — to enter the United States.
The Second Circuit’s ruling comes six weeks after two teenagers were criminally charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization for allegedly… Bring explosives To a “Stop the Islamist Takeover of New York City” event outside the residence of Manhattan Mayor Zahran Mamdani. the Homemade devices Didn’t explode.
A criminal complaint against the men alleged that they were inspired by ISIS.