As
another day passed with Mr. Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb
he had admitted driving into Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on
Wednesday about the couple and their life together, along with speculation about
his radicalization. People who knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan,
said he had changed in the past year or so, becoming more reserved and more
religious as he faced what someone who knows the family well called “their
financial troubles.”Last year, one Pakistani friend said, he even asked his
father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired high-ranking air force pilot in Pakistan, for
permission to fight in Afghanistan. -- James Barron And
Sabrina TaverniseFaisal Shahzad: Money Woes, Long Silences and a Zeal for Islam
By James Barron And Sabrina
Tavernise
May 5, 2010
Theirs was an arranged marriage:
two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a
mutual friend. He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at
parties.
The couple in this Web photo are
identified as Faisal Shahzad and Huma Mian. Ms. Mian is thought to be in
Pakistan.
At their wedding in Peshawar six
years ago, men and women danced separately but also together, “a rarity at that
time,” recalled one guest. “It was such a huge gathering that even their family
friends from Qatar came.”
When they returned to the United
States, his colleagues at the cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden celebrated with a
small office party.
The husband, Faisal Shahzad, put
photographs of his wife, Huma Mian, on his desk at the Arden office in Stamford,
Conn. They bought a brand-new house for $273,000, 35 miles away on Long Hill
Avenue in Shelton. By the time they moved in, she was pregnant, the neighbors
recalled.
As another day passed with Mr.
Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb he had admitted driving into
Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on Wednesday about the couple and
their life together, along with speculation about his radicalization. People who
knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan, said he had changed in the past
year or so, becoming more reserved and more religious as he faced what someone
who knows the family well called “their financial troubles.”
Last year, one Pakistani friend
said, he even asked his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired high-ranking air force
pilot in Pakistan, for permission to fight in Afghanistan.
Mr. Haq, now in his 70s,
adamantly refused, according to a person familiar with the conversation, saying
that he disapproved of the mission and reminding his son that Islam does not
permit a man to abandon his wife or children.
As a newlywed, the wedding guest
said of Mr. Shahzad by e-mail from Pakistan, “there was no sign of him being
extremist or, for that matter, he wasn’t a bit religious.” But in the past
couple of years, after changing jobs and fathering two children, Mr. Shahzad
“started talking more of Islam.” The guest spoke on the condition he not be
identified because of concerns about his safety in the wake of the attempted car
bombing.
“The recession had taken a toll
on them, I guess,” he wrote in an e-mail message from Pakistan. He said that
their money worries became apparent in 2008 or 2009 and that Mr. Shahzad “lost
his way during the financial problems.” JPMorgan Chase has since moved to
foreclose on the Shelton house, which the couple had abandoned in a hurry,
leaving behind clothes and toys.
In February, Mr. Shahzad leased
a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport, Conn. His landlord said he never saw Mr.
Shahzad’s wife. Faiz Ahmad, a friend from the Shahzad family’s ancestral
village, Mohib Banda, said that when he last saw Mr. Shahzad, at a wedding a
year and a half ago, he was sure that something was wrong. Mr. Shahzad seemed
changed, he said, sitting by himself and not talking very
much.
He was “completely quiet on the
sofa, like someone who has some worries, and undergoing some internal change,”
Mr. Ahmad said. “So he was sitting silent, silent. And silence in itself is a
question.”
A Pakistani man said that an
acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that within
the past year, Mr. Shahzad had peered critically at a glass of whiskey the
friend was holding, indicating a judgmental stance typical for rigid
jihadis.
Mr. Shahzad, now 30, appeared to
be tracing a familiar arc of frustration, increasing religiosity and, finally,
violence. He was born and raised in Pakistan, with a privileged upbringing in a
moderate family that lived in at least three places — Karachi, Rawalpindi and
Mohib Banda. Mr. Haq, according to Mr. Ahmad, “was a man of modern thinking and
of the modern age.”
Family friends interviewed on
Wednesday said they believed that Mr. Haq was in hiding in the city of Dera
Ghazi Khan in western Pakistan, where the family has wheat fields. Mr. Shahzad’s
wife was also believed to be in Pakistan, though her whereabouts was unknown.
Dawn, a Pakistani daily, reported that her father had been arrested in Karachi,
but Pakistani authorities would not confirm that.
Mr. Shahzad, the youngest of
four, was born into a new generation in the years after a military autocrat, Zia
ul-Haq, began to inject a rigid version of Islam into Pakistan’s education
system. At the same time, hard-line mosques were given money and land, elevating
a narrow, often sectarian world view that cast a pall over young
Pakistanis.
Ms. Mian, the oldest of four,
was born in Colorado, though she spent summer vacations in Pakistan and lived
with her family in Qatar for a while as a child, according to the wedding guest.
Her father, Mohammad Asif Mian, earned two master’s degrees at the Colorado
School of Mines in Golden, Colo., in the 1980s, and has written four
books.
In the best-selling “Project
Economics and Decision Analysis,” published in 2002, Mr. Mian thanked family
members for their patience and support, adding, “Special thanks to my daughters
at the University of Colorado for being on the dean’s list; this has contributed
a lot to my enthusiasm.”
Ms. Mian and her sisters, Saba
and Hina, all studied at Denver-area colleges and shared a house just off the
campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2003 and
2004.
Huma Mian married Mr. Shahzad
soon after earning an accounting degree in 2004, and moved to Connecticut, where
he was pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Bridgeport and, on an H-1B visa
for highly skilled workers, was working as an operation analyst at Elizabeth
Arden, managing and analyzing accounts receivable, according to a résumé
obtained by MSNBC.
“I was always surprised, with
her having to buy milk for the baby and everything else, how they afforded this
on one income,” recalled Brenda J. Thurman, a neighbor in
Shelton.
The couple did not socialize
much with people on their block. “It was three years before I knew she spoke
English,” Ms. Thurman said.
Ms. Thurman said that Ms. Mian
left for a couple of months in late 2008 or early 2009, and that Mr. Shahzad
told her she was going to Pakistan to have their second child. Within a few
months of her return, they packed up and left again last summer. Mr. Shahzad,
who had left Elizabeth Arden in 2006 to become a client reporting analyst at
Affinion, a financial marketing services company in Norwalk, Conn., quit his job
there.
Piles of garbage remained
outside the home in Shelton this week, filled with clues about their lives.
There were packets of Nair, moisturizer with Arabic writing on the back, a
makeup brush, a Japanese cherry blossom scent body spritzer, wrapping paper and
gift bags that appeared to be for baby gifts.
There was an envelope addressed
to “Faisal, Huma and Alishaba,” which contained a card proclaiming,
“Congratulations on your new little girl!”
How, why or where Mr. Shahzad
became radicalized remains unclear. Dr. Saud Anwar, the founder of a
Pakistani-American association in Connecticut, said that as soon as Mr.
Shahzad’s name surfaced in connection with the car bomb, he canvassed
Connecticut Muslim and Pakistani groups and found he was not involved with any
of them.
But Dr. Anwar said he had been
in touch with a university classmate of Mr. Shahzad’s, a man of Pakistani
descent who told Dr. Anwar he did not want to be interviewed by reporters. The
classmate said he had remained friends with the couple and had noticed something
different about Mr. Shahzad about a year ago.
“His personality had changed —
he had become more introverted,” Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. “He had
a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated
about things.” Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had
come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be “on
his own that he was learning all these things.”
Mr. Ahmad, the friend from Mohib
Banda, speculated that the transformation was rooted in Karachi. An associate of
Mr. Shahzad’s was arrested in a mosque believed to have ties with a militant
group in Karachi early Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence officials
said.
“The question is who has put
Faisal in this path?” Mr. Ahmad asked. “The Faisal with the beard that you see,
he was not the old Faisal. He was like you, like me, handsome, liberal and an
active person.”
According to Pakistan’s
information minister, Mr. Shahzad traveled to Pakistan 13 times in the past
seven years. One Pakistani official who knew the family said it was unlikely
that Mr. Shahzad would have been radicalized in Pakistan if he was only on short
trips, which tend to be dominated by family commitments like weddings; the
criminal complaint against him filed on Tuesday says that he returned in
February from a five-month stint. It also said Mr. Shahzad had been trained in
bomb-making in Waziristan.
Another family friend in
Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad “emotional” and said that he used to
carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had
become enraged by the United States’ military actions, fueled by the Pakistani
press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.
“A person sees the brutality of
Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mr. Ali noted. “These scenes affect
people.”
The résumé posted Wednesday on
msnbc.com said Mr. Shahzad held three different positions at Elizabeth Arden
over five years starting in mid-2001, and then spent three years at Affinion. At
Arden, he said he had “decreased bad debt write-offs by 47 percent” and
“recovered over $2.5 mil in ‘lost’ revenue.” At Affinion, he said he prepared
“monthly commission forecasting for high-profile Affinion clients such as
Citibank, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, Peoples Bank, US Bank, Wells
Fargo and a couple of smaller clients.”
But James Hart, an Affinion
spokesman, said “there’s a lot of résumé puffery in there” and that Mr. Shahzad
had been “one rung up from entry level” when he left.
A former manager at Elizabeth
Arden said that he was the only Pakistani working for the company at the time,
but never asked for special accommodation for prayer. And she remembered that on
Sept. 11, Mr. Shahzad, like everyone else, huddled around the one radio in the
office, listening to bulletins about the attacks on the World Trade
Center.
“I think he was just normal,”
she recalled. “Isn’t it always the case, though? It’s always the normal ones
that you don’t really think they’re going to do something like
this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06profile.html?src=mv
Reporting for articles on the
Times Square bomb case was contributed by Peter Baker, Anne Barnard, Nina
Bernstein, Alison Leigh Cowan, Adam B. Ellick, Andrea Elliott, Dan Frosch, Kirk
Johnson, Mark Landler, Mike McIntire, Sharon Otterman, Ray Rivera, David E.
Sanger, Michael S. Schmidt, Daniel E. Slotnik, Adam Ellick and Karen
Zraick.
10:00 PM
Sultan Shahin
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