By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) – U.S. law enforcement arrested a homeless Florida man on Wednesday and charged him with a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange after an undercover employee recorded him saying “I feel like Bin Laden,” claims federal officials.
According to an FBI statement, the suspect, Harun Abdul-Malik Yener, took steps to detonate a bomb outside the Wall Street exchange in lower Manhattan. The affidavit was filed in support of a criminal complaint accusing Yener of attempting to damage or destroy a building used in interstate commerce by means of an explosive.
Yener has been assigned a federal public defender in the Southern District of Florida, whose office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a statement on his defense.
Yener’s motives remained unclear. The FBI said that in addition to his comments about Osama bin Laden, the former leader of Al Qaeda and the mastermind behind the 2001 attacks on the United States, Yener also described an attempt to join right-wing militias and a general anti- government sentiment by saying: “This country is ready for a revolution.”
The FBI had been investigating the suspect, described as unhoused and living in Coral Gables, Florida, since February after receiving a tip that he was storing bomb-making schematics in a storage facility, the FBI said.
FBI agents found sketches of bombs, timers, circuit boards and other electronics.
In conversations with at least three undercover operatives, Yener said detonating an improvised explosive device would lead to a “reboot” or “reset” of the U.S. government.
“The Exchange, we want to capitalize on that because it will wake people up,” he added, according to the FBI statement.
Yener wanted a device powerful enough to blow off the doors so that “anything that exists in there will be killed,” Yener told two undercover employees who told him they had access to commercial explosives, the FBI said.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, Editing by Ross Colvin and Lincoln Feast.)
