New York women charged in US bomb plot

Two New York women inspired by Al-Qaeda and fanatics in Syria were arrested yesterday, charged with planning to build a bomb and carry out a terror attack, prosecutors said.

Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, risk facing the rest of their lives behind bars if convicted of ‘conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction’ in the United States.

The pair, roommates in Queens, were shadowed for nearly two years by an undercover FBI agent and are scheduled to appear before a magistrate at the federal district court in Brooklyn yesterday.

Siddiqui was “in possession of multiple propane gas tanks, as well as instructions for how to transform propane tanks into explosive devices,” a copy of the complaint states.

Prosecutors say the pair supported violent jihad, with Siddiqui writing a poem in an Al-Qaeda magazine as early as 2009 and Velentzas calling Osama bin Laden one of her heroes, allegedly keeping a picture of the Al-Qaeda mastermind on her mobile phone.

Velentzas recently described the two women as “citizens” of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group fighting in Iraq and Syria, prosecutors said. They communicated with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, and watched videos of beheadings carried out by IS extremists in Syria, the complaint said.

In conversations with the undercover FBI officer, the pair allegedly discussed building a bomb to carry out a terror attack and efforts to avoid detection by the government.