Would-Be Times Square Bomber's House Goes Back to Bank as Bids Fall Short
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Faisal Shahzad, charged with trying to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square, made his first court appearance yesterday in federal court in Manhattan, where he was assigned a lawyer and ordered held without bail. Bloomberg's Deirdre Bolton reports. (Source: Bloomberg)
The former Connecticut home of Faisal Shahzad, who tried unsuccessfully to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in May, became the property of his lender after a public foreclosure auction over the weekend.
Nobody stepped forward to top the $227,400 bid submitted by Chase Home Finance for Shahzad’s former home in Shelton, a city of about 38,000 people about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Manhattan, before an auction held outside the residence on July 31, said George Temple, an attorney appointed by Connecticut Superior Court to handle the sale.
About three interested parties showed up for the auction on the property of the 1,356-square-foot, three-bedroom Colonial, Temple said. Shahzad bought the home in 2004 for $273,000, and added his wife’s name to the deed in 2007, according to the Shelton assessor’s office. The residence was assessed at about $243,000.
Shahzad left Connecticut in June 2009 for Pakistan, and his wife and two children followed him, he told a U.S. judge in Manhattan while pleading guilty last month. Chase Home Finance sued him and his wife for foreclosure in September, and the court on May 28 ordered the house sold at auction, court records show.
Shahzad told the judge he returned to the U.S. in February and rented a home in Bridgeport, about nine miles southwest of Shelton, where he made the bomb that he drove into Times Square on May 1.
A vehicle containing an improvised bomb was found smoking on the street. Shahzad was arrested at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on May 3 after boarding a flight to Dubai. He pleaded guilty to 10 terrorism-related charges and faces a mandatory life prison term at his sentencing Oct. 5.
The criminal case is U.S. v. Shahzad, 10-00928, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in New York at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net.
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page