Maybe he had bomb-making plans. Maybe he didn’t. An update on this story. “FBI quizzes Colorado man for 2nd day in terror probe,” from CNN, September 18 (thanks to AINA):
DENVER, Colorado (CNN) — A Colorado resident at the center of a federal terrorism probe met with FBI agents for a second day Thursday as his lawyer disputed a report that bomb-making plans were found on the man’s computer.
Federal agents searched Najibullah Zazi’s apartment and another home in the same Denver suburb on Wednesday in connection with the terrorism probe, which emerged Monday with a series of raids in the New York borough of Queens. A law enforcement official told CNN that diagrams showing how to make bombs were found on the computer Zazi had with him when he was stopped in New York during a recent visit, but his lawyer, Arthur Folsom, dismissed that allegation.
“There’s no diagram of a bomb. There’s no information like that,” Folsom told reporters as he walked his client to his second meeting with federal agents. If something like that had turned up on Zazi’s computer, he said, “Do you really think the FBI would have allowed us to walk out of here last night?”
Zazi, an Afghan national, gave writing, fingerprint and DNA samples to FBI agents Wednesday during a “very friendly, very cordial” interview, Folsom said. He said Zazi has no ties to terrorism, and he believes his client drew investigators’ attention “because he stayed at a house owned by an old friend of his who was under observation from the FBI.“
But according to law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation, the Colorado searches were part of a probe that began with Zazi and led to New York.
A former counterterrorism official briefed on the investigation also said bomb instructions were found, but could not say where. The former official said backpacks, computers and maps were found during the searches in New York, and field tests turned up positive for explosives. But initial tests often yield false positives, and the former official was unaware whether more definitive tests had been concluded….