Mundane money worries created the Times Square bomber

NEW YORK - Mounting financial woes rather than working assiduously to establishing contact with key terrorist networks or elements may have pushed 30-year-old Faisal Shazad to take the extreme step of planting a car bomb in New York’s Times Square, feel experts.

Speculation is growing that it may have been mundane money worries and a sense of personal failure that finally sent Shahzad, right, over the edge.

A discarded cache of personal mail, dumped outside his Connecticut home there during a recent clear out, has a tale they tell, and it is not of contacts with shadowy terrorist groups or plots against the West, but a narrative that millions of ordinary Americans can identify with since the financial meltdown of 2008, reports The Telegraph.

One is a letter from the Connecticut Superior Court, demanding he attend a repossession hearing on his home; another is from a debt collection agency, saying he owed them more than 15,000 dollars. A third message is friendlier in tone, but reveals just why his financial woes might have worried him so much - it is a pink greetings card addressed to him and his wife, Huma, which reads “Congratulations on your new little girl!”

Anti-terror police in New York is still unraveling just what else might have turned a seemingly normal young family man into a terrorist.

Former friends recall a bright, cheerful man who cared little for religion when he got married back in Pakistan six years ago, but whose personality dramatically soured from 2008 onwards - almost in tune with the darkening economic climate.

“He lost his way during the financial problems,” said one friend, who asked not to be named.

A Connecticut policeman put it more bluntly: “He got screwed by the recession just like the rest of us, only he chose to react the way he did.”

For whatever outside help he may have had, it is clear that the “sub-prime bomber”, as he might be dubbed, was nothing less than sub-standard in delivery.

Shahzad seems to have taken the art to almost Keystone Cops level of ineptitude. Indeed, the “Idiot Bomber”, as he has been nicknamed by various sections of the US media, will go down in history as arguably America’s least professional terrorist. (ANI)