Man faces sentencing Monday in plot to bomb NYC subway near busy shopping center

Monday, January 8th 2007, 6:17 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ Shahawar Matin Siraj was either a naive stooge lured into a phony bomb plot or a homegrown terrorist determined to inflict misery on New Yorkers as revenge for wartime abuses of Iraqis, according to court papers filed in advance of his sentencing.

On Monday, the man convicted on conspiracy charges in a scheme to blow up one of the city's busiest subway stations could get more than 30 years in prison during sentencing in federal court.

Defense attorneys have sought to convince a judge that their client's sentence should not exceed 10 years since the attack never came close to being carried out.

Siraj, a 21-year-old high school dropout at the time of his arrest, ``is not a dangerous psychopath, but more of a confused and misguided youngster,'' the defense team argued in its papers.

Prosecutors countered that the Pakistani immigrant deserves at least 30 years _ and possibly life _ behind bars as the ``driving force'' behind a ``workable terrorist plot'' to set off explosives at the subway station of Herald Square, in a shopping area that includes Macy's flagship department store.

``The offense was the brainchild and handiwork of the defendant,'' the government's papers said.

Siraj and another man suspected in the plot, James Elshafay, were arrested on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention carrying crude diagrams of Herald square. Elshafay immediately agreed to cooperate with the government.

Authorities said Siraj had no affiliation with known terrorist organizations. Instead, he was a relative loner whose anti-American rants caught the attention of a police informant, Osama Eldawoody, and an undercover officer.

Eldawoody, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Egypt, had been assigned by the NYPD to identify and track Islamic extremists in Muslim neighborhoods after Sept. 11. He and the undercover officer emerged last year at Siraj's trial as the government's star witnesses.

While wearing a wire and assuming the role of an accomplice, Eldawoody assured Siraj that any plan he concocted would have the backing of a fictitious faction called The Brotherhood. On tape, Siraj was recorded musing about possibly destroying the Verrazano-Narrows and three other bridges serving Staten Island or killing Microsoft founder Bill Gates before settling on Herald Square as a target.

Testifying in his own defense, Siraj said he never had a violent thought before he fell under the spell of the 50-year-old Eldawoody. He said the older man became a mentor and instructed him that there was a fatwa, or religious edict, permitting the killing of U.S. soldiers and law enforcement agents.

Eldawoody had himself talked about ``blowing up the buildings and blowing up the Wall Street places,'' the defendant said. He admitted taking steps to attack the subway station, but only after the informant inflamed him by showing him photos of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

According to the recent defense filings, he has since expressed his regret.

``I feel really, really bad and apologize to everybody,'' he told a psychologist. ``I was just foolish, just angry.''