New York: Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American accused of trying to blow up a car bomb in the heart of Times Square in New York, may have been poring through the Internet since 2006 to gather information on jihad. (
Read: Faisal Shahzad a terrorist or plain disgruntled?)
FoxNews.com reported that it has uncovered several dozens of postings by a man named Faisal Shahzad on radical Islamist Salafist websites devoted to a variety of different jihadist sects. The person also visited a website of the Deobandi school of thought in India.
Experts suspect this is the same Faisal Shahzad whom authorities have charged with plotting to explode a massive car bomb in New York on Saturday. If so, then he has been educating himself on the Internet for years on the legitimacy of holy war, FoxNews said on its website.
Shahzad visited numerous websites devoted to ideological discussion of Islamism and Shariah law.
His apparent online posts date back to at least 2006, three years before the Times Square suspect became a naturalised American citizen, the report said.
"If the person on these websites is indeed the suspected bomber, the postings show that he was intellectually thinking about engaging in jihadism for a few years," said Dr Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Islamist Salafists are extreme radical militants who are calling for the establishment of a Taliban-like regime in the Muslim world, and who seek to replace secular laws around the world with Muslim Shariah law.
"Individuals do not become jihadists overnight or because of one major crisis or event, as some social scientists proclaim," Phares said. "They become jihadists over time, after a gradual change, consciously in a stable intellectual process."
An FBI spokesman said any possible online postings by Shahzad would be investigated.
An intelligence source initially provided Fox News with a link to what was believed to be an online posting by the Times Square suspect.
Using details from that post, FoxNews.com found several dozen more on radical Islamic jihadist sites devoted to a range of Salafist sects. These other postings shared either the same IP address in Pakistan or e-mail address or partial e-mail address.
In many of his posts, the man intelligence officials believe is the Times Square bomber appears to be an eager and inquisitive student, and he frequently engaged in discussions revolving around the ideological argument at the heart of different schools of jihadist thought.
For example, he questioned the ideology behind a fatwa issued by the Deobandi school of thought in India.
In other posts, also uncovered by FoxNews.com, a user who also appears to be Shahzad inquired about how to obtain work visas in Italy and Canada.