Family shocked at Bangladeshi’s arrest in NY plot

DHAKA: The parents of a Bangladeshi man arrested for allegedly trying to bomb the Federal Reserve building in New York City on Thursday said their son could not have done what he was being accused of doing.
The FBI arrested Quazi Muhammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis after he tried to detonate a fake 1,000-pound (454-kilogram) car bomb, according to a criminal complaint.
His family said yesterday that Nafis was a gentle man incapable of such actions. “My son can’t do it,” said his father, Quazi Ahsanullah. He called on the Bangladesh government to intervene to get his son back to his home country.
Authorities in New York allege that Nafis travelled to the US with “the purpose of conducting a terrorist attack” and actively sought out Al-Qaeda contacts after his arrival.
But the family of the 21-year-old insist he had never displayed any radical tendencies but was rather a devout Muslim whose arrest had come as a deep shock.
“We’re stunned. Nafis is not a radical type. He says prayers five times a day, and reads the Qur’an and Hadith every day,” his father told AFP yesterday. “We don’t believe that he can have committed this... He is our pride and joy.”
Nafis’s extended family lives in North Jatrabari, an upper middle-class neighborhood of southeastern Dhaka. His father is a senior vice president of National Bank and his sister is a doctor.
Speaking to AFP from the family home yesterday, Nafis’s brother-in-law Arik said they had spoken to him only hours before his arrest and even discussed a possible bride for him. “We heard the news this morning. Everyone is crying here,” said Arik. “Nafis never showed any form of radicalisation when he was in Bangladesh.”
Nafis had been an unexceptional high school student but managed to get a place as an undergraduate at North South University, a private university known for being the country’s most liberal center of learning as well as its most expensive.
Bangladesh is an overwhelmingly Muslim and conservative country, but North South stands out as a place where upper-class students can mingle freely on campus.
University officials said that Nafis had struggled during his eight semesters as an electrical engineering and telecommunications student and had been effectively forced to leave after disappointing exam results.

His family and Nafis’s own Facebook page show that he then moved to the United States where he initially took up a place at Missouri Southern State University.
Nafis has allegedly written a statement claiming responsibility for his planned attack in which he said he wanted to “destroy America” and referred to slain Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden as “beloved.”
He has been charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to support Al-Qaeda. Federal prosecutors office say he “attempted to recruit individuals to form a terrorist cell inside the United States”.
But according to his father, Nafis’s main concern was trying to scrape together a living to afford to pay for a computer science course and for the rent on a property he was sharing with a relative in the Queens district.
“He used to work 10 hours a day at the hotel,” said Ahsanullah.