Would-be NYC subway bomber who plotted to blow up Herald Sq. station denied compassionate release

A terrorist convicted of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station lost another bid in his decadeslong effort to get sprung from prison because the federal judge who handed down his sentence says he hasn’t taken responsibility for his crime.

Shahawar Matin Siraj, 40, got 30 years in prison in 2007 for planning to blow up the busy subway station. Last Monday, Brooklyn Federal Judge Nina Gershon, who handed down his sentence, denied his motion for early release.

It’s the latest legal setback for Siraj, who has lost several appeals, and, most recently, filed unsuccessful motions before Gershon to have his sentence reduced and his conviction overturned.

Siraj argued at trial, and in the years after, that he was entrapped by a duplicitous government informant who goaded him into violence and insisted he take part in the plot even after he wanted to back out.

As part of his motion for compassionate release, Siraj’s lawyers argued that he found out after the trial he was targeted by the informant because of the work of the NYPD’s widely criticized demographics unit — which surveilled and spied on the Muslim community after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Gershon wasn’t swayed.

“How it came about that there was an undercover officer who went to the bookstore where Mr. Siraj was working and provided information to the NYPD of potential criminal activity does not alter Mr. Siraj’s culpability or justify compassionate release in this case,” she wrote. “The factual issue of entrapment was at the heart of Mr. Siraj’s defense, and it was for the jury to decide.”

Siraj, then 21, and James Elshafay, 19, were arrested on Aug. 27, 2004, a few days before the Republican National Convention in New York, for plotting to blow up the Herald Square station at Broadway and W. 34th St. The station is beneath a crowded shopping area that includes Macy’s flagship store.

Elshafay, who pleaded guilty and testified at Siraj’s trial, was sentenced to five years.

At his trial in 2006, Siraj testified he was goaded into the plot by Osama Eldawoody, then 50. Eldawoody was a paid police informant who met Siraj at Islamic Books & Tapes, the Brooklyn bookstore where the young Pakistani immigrant worked.

Eldawoody — who was paid $100,000 for his work as an informant who monitored mosques and other locations where Muslims in New York gathered — showed Siraj images of prisoners being abused at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, enraging him, and talked about blowing up locations like Wall Street, Siraj testified. Eldawoody said he was backed by a shadowy upstate group called the Brotherhood, which didn’t actually exist, and pressured him into plotting a terrorist attack, Siraj testified.

Siraj claimed he cooked up the plot to impress Eldawoody — but said his only aim was to damage the U.S. economy, and that he tried to back out when he realized civilians could be hurt.

Federal prosecutors convinced the jury that Siraj played a key role in the plot, even if he didn’t want to place any backpack bombs himself.

The feds played a video showing Siraj saying he’d help with the planning, and offered input on Elshafay’s idea to dress in religious Jewish garb to disguise himself.

Siraj’s most recent bid for release was filed under the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill that received bipartisan support in Congress and was signed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018.

Siraj, who federal prison records show is slated to finish his sentence in 2030, pointed to his rehabilitation behind bars, submitting several letters of support from family members and fellow inmates.

“Mr. Siraj’s remarkable rehabilitation and efforts to combat extremist thinking both in prison and outside it demonstrate that Mr. Siraj has exhausted all the possible correctional treatment he could possibly receive,” his attorneys wrote in October.

But his statements about entrapment worked against him, and Gershon, who called his progress in prison “impressive,” couldn’t get past his assertions of innocence — pointing to a letter, written by Siraj in 2014 to dissuade Muslim youths from becoming extremists, which was submitted as part of his motion.

At one point in the letter, Siraj wrote, “I am sincerely giving advice to all with my own personal experience being charged with terrorism which I am innocent of and many of you know about me. I was charged for what I said.”

The judge countered, “Mr. Siraj’s claim of innocence, made not once, but multiple times, contradicts his assertion that he has accepted responsibility for his actions, and raises serious questions about the extent of his rehabilitation.”

Siraj’s lawyers also brought up COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns at his prison in Otisville, N.Y., and the “inhumane” conditions he endured from 2007 to 2011 in the communications management unit, a converted Death Row facility at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

That unit, often referred to as “Little Gitmo,” mainly housed Muslims convicted of terrorism-related crimes, and inmates were kept in “near-complete isolation” and made to sleep on concrete beds, Siraj contended. His ceiling leaked, and his cell was infested with insects and vermin, he said.

Siraj’s attorneys declined comment for this article.