NYPD informant who tracked militants quits, denounces police

NYPD informant who tracked militants quits, denounces police

Inside the White House

A behind-the-scenes look at the White House.

WASHINGTON |
Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:15pm EDT

(Reuters) - An informant recruited by
the New York Police Department to collect information on suspected
Islamic militants has quit and denounced his police handlers, according
to a law enforcement source familiar with the case.

The informant, a 19-year-old
Bangladeshi native, was recruited by the NYPD recently as part of an
expansive intelligence-gathering program the department launched after
the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. His assignment was to make
contact with suspected Islamic extremists to try to determine if they
had any inclinations to engage in violence, the source said.
On
October 2, however, the informant, whom the source did not name, posted
a message on his personal Facebook page exposing himself as an
informant to people he had been in contact with. He declared that he had
quit as a police informant.
"I was
jus (sic) of pretending to be friends with ya cuz I honestly thought i
was fighting terrorism, but let's be real, it's all a f...king scheme,"
the informant wrote, according to the source. "It was all about the
money," he added.
The source said
that the informant was not involved in an investigation that led to the
arrest of a Bangladeshi man last week in connection with an alleged
scheme to bomb the New York Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan.
New
York law enforcement sources have said that the NYPD has used
foreign-born confidential informants to uncover several alleged plots by
militants, including one involving a possible attack on a subway
station at Herald Square and another involving alleged plans to kill
U.S. soldiers returning to New York from Afghanistan and Iraq.
NYPD
Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said that candidates to join the force
as sworn officers must be U.S. citizens. But he said 20 percent of the
department's recruit classes were foreign-born.
"We
have a deep bench of foreign speakers whose first languages include
Urdu, Arabic, and scores of others," Browne said. "Most CIs
(confidential informants) perform invaluable, life-saving service; some
don't work out," he added, while declining to comment on the specific
current case of the informant who quit.


Source:-
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/us-usa-newyork-informant-idUSBRE89L1JS20121022