Two Jamaica women last week were arrested by federal agents for conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against persons or property in the United States, according to Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, appeared before a magistrate judge for the first time last Thursday. According to Lynch, as alleged in the complaint, the women have repeatedly expressed their support for violent jihad. In or about 2009, Siddiqui wrote a poem in a magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that exhorted readers to wage jihad and declared that there is “[n]o excuse to sit back and wait—for the skies rain martyrdom.” More recently, Velentzas, who has characterized al-Qaeda founder Usama Bin Laden as one of her heroes, declared that she and Siddiqui are “citizens of the Islamic State”—a reference to the foreign terrorist organization that is also known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Less than two weeks ago, Velentzas, asked whether she had heard the news about the recent arrest of a former U.S. airman who had attempted to travel to Syria to wage jihad, stated that she did not understand why people were traveling overseas to engage in jihad when there were more opportunities of “pleasing Allah” in the United States.
Valentzas and Siddiqui also allegedly researched and acquired some of the components of a car bomb, like the one used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; a fertilizer bomb, like the one used in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City; and a pressure cooker bomb, like the one used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The investigation recently revealed that the defendants possessed propane gas tanks together with instructions from an online jihadist publication for transforming propane tanks into explosive devices.
By Michael V. Cusenza michael@theforumnewsgroup.com
