A hoaxer who triggered an evacuation after warning U.S. officials a chemical bomb was about to explode in busy Times Square, New York, was locked up for four years following copycat claims in London.
Jobless Jamal Ahmed, 20, of Miersfield, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, made a string of bogus calls to Scotland Yard, the NYPD, the CIA and other security agencies.
New York cops evacuated several addresses on West 45th Street, including Frankie and Johnnies’s Steakhouse – where the bomb was supposedly planted – closed the street and ushered in bomb experts.
Ahmed, who claimed he was bored and high on cannabis when making the terror calls, pleaded guilty at Aylesbury Crown Court to two counts of communicating information which he knew or believed to be false with the intent of inducing false belief that a chemical bomb was to detonate.
The day after the New York scare Ahmed made a similar chemical bomb hoax call to the Home Office, claiming he was a foreign spy with knowledge of an Al Qaeda London plot.
Ahmed, fortunate not to be rotting in an American Supermax Prison in the middle of the Nevada desert for terror offences, was sentenced to thirty-two months imprisonment for the New York call, plus sixteen months for the London hoax.
Detectives from the Met's Counter Terrorism Command traced the calls – made on a pal’s SIM card - to Ahmed’s home address where they arrested him.
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