Poor Terrorist Facing Foreclosure Has Very Well-to-Do Relatives

Those media lamentations of the poor guy being in foreclosure seems to have gone by the wayside pretty quickly and now it turns out daddy was a Pakistani air force chief and his father-in-law an oil executive.

Time to refresh the narrative.

It was still unclear yesterday where he was born. Officials in Pakistan have said that it was in the northern province of Nowshera, but on university application forms found in a rubbish bin outside his abandoned home in Shelton, Connecticut, he gave Karachi as his place of birth.

What is beyond doubt is that he first came to the US in 1998 as 19-year-old student, the son of an air vice-marshal of the Pakistani Air Force, Baharul Haq, who remains well known as the founder of the Sherdils, the country’s leading military aerobatics team. He acquired two degrees, in computer science and business administration, from small private colleges in Washington and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

He showed no outward sign of being radicalised as a student or since. No mosques contacted since he allegedly left a smoking SUV in Times Square on Saturday have acknowledged any contact with a Faisal Shahzad. He shopped at a halal grocery in Bridgeport before his final trip to Pakistan last year, but he and his family also ate at the Red Lobster chain and Burger King.

On February 3 Mr Shahzad returned from Pakistan after nine months in Waziristan, but slipped beneath the FBI’s radar because, since April last year, he has been a US citizen and was therefore subject only to cursory immigration checks. His entitlement to citizenship came courtesy of his wife, Huma Mian, the daughter of a successful oil executive. They married in 2004

It's not clear how long his wife has been back in Pakistan but it's apparent when Shahzad decided to stop paying his mortgage he wasn't planning on staying in his "new home" very long.

Meanwhile, now we discover he's been on the Homeland Security watch since 1999.

Sources tell CBS News that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appeared on a Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list - Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS) - between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the United States.

TECS is a major law enforcement computer system that allows its approximately 120,000 users from 20 federal agencies to share information. The database is designed to identify individuals suspected of or involved in violation of federal law.

Further exploding the story he was having financial problems is the fact he sure had plenty of cash on him lately considering he paid cash for the bomb vehicle and his airfare out of the country.

Where'd that money come from?

Update: It also looks like Shahzad couldn't get out of his own way.

The night before leaving an SUV containing a homemade bomb in Times Square, admitted terrorist Faisal Shahzad did a dry run for his fiendish plot and dropped off a getaway car nearby, The Post has learned.

But the "idiot" bomber was unable to use that vehicle — a white Isuzu — because he had accidentally left the keys behind in the smoldering 1993 Nissan Pathfinder after parking it on West 45th Street with the bomb, a law-enforcement source said.

Shahzad instead was forced to take a Metro-North train home to Connecticut that night.

Shahzad, 30, has told investigators he drove the Isuzu to New York City on Friday night and went through Times Square past the location where he would drop off the Pathfinder the next night, the source said.