The Herald Square bomb plotter posed as a Bronx Bomber fan to slip in and out of a subway station undetected, prosecutors revealed yesterday.
While discussing the details of his planned terror strike on the 34th Street station, Shahawar Matin Siraj told a co-conspirator that wearing Yankee apparel would make the plotters look inconspicuous.
“Wear like this kind of stuff with the New York Yankees on it or something,” Siraj, 23, told accomplice Osama El Dawoody, who was actually working for the NYPD.
“[That way,] nobody knows what we are, what we doing down there,” said Siraj in a taped Aug. 13, 2004, conversation during a car ride with El Dawoody – just two weeks before he was arrested on terror conspiracy charges.
During that ride, the Islamic bookstore employee talked about shaving his beard in order to appear less like a Muslim man.
“We should not look like Muslims, we should look like regular people,” El Dawoody said on the witness stand in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
After weeks of wild terrorist strike suggestions, including setting off a nuclear bomb to bring down the Verrazano Bridge, Siraj zeroed in on the city’s transit system.
Jurors listened to him describe in detail how the bomb plot would go down.
The plan would be to have Siraj, or another collaborator, take an early-morning F train from Queens to the 42nd Street station.
Once there, a bomb would be placed in a platform garbage can “or a toilet,” then the train would take the plotter to the 34th Street station and another bomb would be dropped off.