Alexei Saab of Morristown, New Jersey, who has been in custody since July, scouted out locations for attacks in New York, Boston, and Washington and sent the information back to his terrorist friends in Lebanon.
Charges were unveiled in Manhattan on Thursday.
Saab has been a Hizbollah member since 1996 and has extensive firearms and bomb-making training. He’s not a white supremacist. He’s a radical Islamic extremist.
Among Saab’s dozens of alleged New York City targets, prosecutors said, were the George Washington Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Herald Square and the local airports and tunnels.Â
He also surveiled targets in Boston and Washington, including Fenway Park and the Washington Monument.Â
“Saab served as an operative of Hizballah and conducted surveillance of possible target locations in order to help the foreign terrorist organization prepare for potential future attacks against the United States,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in a statement. “Such covert activities conducted on U.S. soil are a clear threat to our national security and I applaud the agents, analysts, and prosecutors who are responsible for this investigation and prosecution.”
U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said Saab’s “true allegiance was to Hizballah,” even though he’s a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Hizbollah is operating international crime rings and they are here in the United States. We missed a golden opportunity to do something about it during the Obama regime but he was concentrating on the nuclear deal.
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