Judge Miriam Cedarbaum gave Shahzad the maximum sentence allowed, five months after he left a Nissan Pathfinder filled with explosives in the city's busiest tourist destination in the hopes of killing as many Americans as possible. "The defendant has shown a total lack of remorse," Cedarbaum said, according to CNN. She said Shahzad, if given the opportunity, would likely strike again.
The judge told him he'll have a lot of time to think about what the Koran says about killing people. "The Koran gives us the right to defend ourselves," he said in response, according to CNN.
As Shahzad entered the courtroom, he warned Americans that more attacks were to come. "Brace yourself for the war with Islam. This is the first droplet of the flood that will follow," the 30-year-old Shahzad said, according to Bloomberg News. "The past nine years, the war with Muslims has achieved nothing for the U.S. except it has awakened Muslims."
Shahzad was arrested two days after the failed attack, pulled off a flight bound for Dubai just before takeoff, and pleaded guilty to terrorism and weapons counts in June. Shahzad, who lived in the United States for over a decade, has not only admitted to the May 1 plot but has been unrepentant about his actions.
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A Failed Attack
"I want to plead guilty and I'm going to plead guilty a hundred times forward," he told Cedarbaum at his June 21 arraignment. Shahzad, who called himself a "mujahid," or Muslim soldier, told the judge that "until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan ... we will be attacking the U.S."
In a statement, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said justice was served. "Faisal Shahzad is a remorseless terrorist who betrayed his adopted country and today was rightly sentenced to spend the rest of his life in federal prison. While his life sentence ensures that he will never again threaten the security of New York City and our nation, together we must remain vigilant against those like him who wish to do us harm."
Prosecutors sought a life sentence, and in recent weeks have emphasized Shahzad's lack of remorse and wish to kill more Americans to drive home their point. They have drawn a chilling sketch of the former Connecticut resident and suburbanite as a cold-blooded terrorist who should be behind bars for the rest of his life.
"He put himself before his family and sought to be embraced by a group of militant extremists in order to exact revenge on the same country where he had lived for nearly a decade," prosecutors wrote in court filings ahead of the sentencing, according to the New York Daily News.
"Far from providing an explanation for his criminal activity, Shahzad's history and characteristics strongly militate in favor of the maximum available sentence," Assistant U.S. Attorney Randall Jackson said in a court document filed last week, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Prosecutors noted that Shahzad had said he planned to attack other targets in New York until he was captured or killed, such as Rockefeller Center and Grand Central Station. And they used dramatic video last week of a simulated explosion designed by the FBI to emulate what might have happened had Shahzad's bomb attempt had been successful.
"Had the bombing played out as Shahzad had so carefully planned, the lives of numerous residents and visitors of the city would have been lost and countless others would have been forever traumatized," they wrote.
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Shahzad, who was married with two young children, seemed to be living an ordinary life before his failed bomb attempt. He bought a house in the Connecticut suburbs, held down a corporate job and earned a master's degree at the University of Bridgeport. But in June 2009, Shahzad simply stopped paying the mortgage on the home and moved his family to Pakistan, where federal prosecutors say he received training with the Pakistani Taliban. Earlier this year, he moved back to the United States on his own and he began plotting the Times Square attack.
While in Pakistan, prosecutors say Shahzad recorded a video expressing his desire to attack the United States. "I have been trying to join my brothers in jihad every day since 9/11 happened. I am planning to wage an attack inside America," he said, according to court papers cited by CNN.