A Queens cab driver pleaded not guilty Friday to being part of a thwarted Al Qaeda plot to bomb New York City last year around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Zarein Ahmedzay entered the plea in Brooklyn Federal Court a day after he and his pal Adis Medunjanin were picked up by federal investigators who had been watching them for months.
“Not guilty,” Ahmedzay said when Brooklyn Magistrate James Orenstein asked him how he pleaded.
Ahmedzay, 24, was ordered held until a bail hearing Tuesday. His lawyer, Michael Marinaccio, said “there should be no reason why he doesn’t get bail.”
“He’s been living in this country for 10 years,” the lawyer added.
“He has family in Afghanistan, but I have family in Italy.’ In Queens, Ahmedzay’s mystified mother said she doesn’t understand why the feds are holding her son.
“He’s a good man,” she said, declining to give her name. “He’s innocent. I don’t know where he is.”
His brother, Nazir, said he’s not that religious and never expressed anti-American sentiments.
“If he did, he wouldn’t be living here,” he said. But Ahmedzay’s 13-year-old sister, Mena, said they all knew they were being watched and insisted her brother was no terrorist.
“He’s a nice guy, he’s just like any other brother,” she said.
Medunjanin was also supposed to be arraigned Friday but sources said he was not cooperating.
The 25-year-old Queens man has been in federal custody since he crashed his car on the Whitestone Expressway while being tailed by G-men on Thursday. Both suspects are believed to be in cahoots with Najibullah Zazi, 24, a Colorado airport driver who was arrested last year.
The feds believe he was the brains behind the failed plot to bomb the city with explosives made from beauty supplies, a charge Zazi denies. All three suspected terrorists attended Flushing High School in Queens.
While Zazi and Ahmedzay are Afghans, Medunjanin’s parents are from Bosnia. Ahmedzay is accused of failing to tell investigators all the locations he visited in Pakistan and Afghanistan between August 2008 and January 2009 – and denying any knowledge that “John Doe” got military training at an Al Qaeda hideout.
Marinaccio, who has represented the late Genovese crime boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante and other high-profile suspects, said he believes John Doe is Zazi.
Medunjanin and Ahmedzay were busted Thursday as part of an FBI task force investigation into a suspected Al Qaeda cell, Special Agent Richard Kolko said earlier. Asked if the Queens men posed a serious terrorist threat, a law enforcement source told the Daily News, “You don’t put that kind of surveillance on small pieces of the puzzle.”
While Ahmedzay, who drives a cab, was grabbed in Greenwich Village, investigators raided Medunjanin’s apartment earlier Thursday and seized his passport, his attorney, Robert Gottlieb, said.
Medunjanin, who graduated last year from Queens College with a degree in economics, handed over the passport and was allowed to leave, sources said. But as Medunjanin drove on the Whitestone he spotted somebody tailing him and called 911.
“He’s driving erratically, then he speeds up and rams into a car in front of him,” the law enforcement source said. Medunjanin was treated for minor bumps and bruises at a Queens hospital before he was taken into custody by the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force. Both men have been watched by the feds since September, when investigators arrested Zazi and raided his friends’ apartments in Queens – including Medunjanin’s pad.
Those raids turned up bomb-making equipment, and Zazi was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.
Zazi told the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force after he was arrested that he had received Al Qaeda training in weapons and explosives in Pakistan but denied any plot to bomb New York.
