A Pakistani national charged with plotting an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on a Jewish center in New York City pleaded guilty on Wednesday, federal prosecutors said.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 21-year-old Pakistani citizen living in Canada, pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Khan was arrested while attempting to illegally enter the United States through the northern border. He planned to inflict significant casualties, according to the Department of Justice. “Khan planned a mass shooting at a Jewish center in New York City, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks, with the explicit goal of killing as many Jews as possible,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said.
Khan considered Brooklyn’s large Jewish population as the “perfect” venue for his attack, authorities said, and claimed his plan could have resulted in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since September 11.
“Muhammad Shahzeb Khan intended to come to New York City and carry out an ISIS-inspired act of terror against our city’s Jewish community,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch said. “The NYPD, in close coordination with our federal partners, was able to stop this dangerous plot before it could become a devastating attack.”
Investigators began tracking Khan in November 2023 after he posted ISIS propaganda videos on social media and openly expressed support for the terror group, according to authorities. Prosecutors said Khan began plotting terrorist attacks in the United States, sharing specific details with two individuals he didn’t know were undercover law enforcement officers. During those exchanges, Khan told an undercover officer he had a U.S.-based associate and planned to use AR-style assault rifles in an unidentified city to “target Israeli Jewish chabads,” prosecutors said.
About a year later, authorities say Khan shifted his focus to a Jewish religious center in Brooklyn, hoping to carry out his attack around the first anniversary of the Hamas-led October 7 terror attacks against Israel.
On social media, Khan encouraged what he believed were co-conspirators to acquire AR-style rifles and hunting knives to “slit their throats.”
A month before the planned attack, Khan attempted to cross the U.S.-Canada border with the help of a human smuggler. Authorities arrested Khan near Ormstown, Canada, approximately 12 miles from the border.
Khan is set to be sentenced on August 12.
This case is a stark reminder of the persistent threat posed by Islamist extremism, even in its apparently foiled manifestations. A young man, radicalized through the familiar channels of online propaganda, crossed borders and oceans in his mind, if not yet fully in body, to pursue the murder of Jews in the very heart of a great American city. The target was not random. It was chosen with precision, timed with malice to mark the anniversary of the October 7 massacre, and animated by the explicit desire to kill as many Jews as possible. That such hatred finds fertile ground among certain communities, and that it can travel so easily across continents, should trouble anyone who still believes that integration and modernity have tamed the older, darker impulses of religious totalitarianism. The authorities acted swiftly and effectively here. Yet the plot itself reveals once again how the ideology of jihad, with its insatiable appetite for Jewish blood, continues to seek new theaters in the West, undeterred by distance, law, or the decency of the societies it seeks to wound.
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