Port Authority Bomber Is Sentenced to Life in Prison

It was 6 a.m. on a Monday in December in 2017 when Akayed Ullah left his Brooklyn apartment with a homemade pipe bomb packed with metal screws strapped to his chest. He headed into the 18th Avenue subway station, boarded an F train and took it to Jay Street MetroTech.

There, he changed to an A train and while riding into Manhattan, he posted a message on Facebook: “O Trump you fail to protect your nation.”

Mr. Ullah got off at Port Authority and entered the crowded underground passageway that runs toward Times Square. There, as he walked, he detonated the bomb, setting off a blast that filled the tunnel with smoke and sent thousands of commuters fleeing.

It was, the authorities have said, nothing short of a miracle that Mr. Ullah, an immigrant from Bangladesh, did not kill anyone. The makeshift bomb malfunctioned, seriously injuring him and sending shrapnel into the leg of a nearby pedestrian. Some victims experienced partial hearing loss.

On Thursday, Mr. Ullah, 31, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a federal judge who rejected his request for mercy.

“This was a calculated, premeditated decision to kill as many people as you could,” the judge, Richard J. Sullivan, said, “all in the name of an organization that is dedicated to spreading terror.”

The fact that Mr. Ullah had failed to execute his plan did not make him any less culpable or his intent less sinister, the judge said.

“This is about as serious a crime as there is,” Judge Sullivan added.

Two victims of the attack also submitted letters that described its lasting impact on their lives. One, David Wall, who had testified at Mr. Ullah’s trial about being left with shrapnel in his right leg and having serious hearing problems, wrote to the judge about the anxiety he still feels when he enters the subway and rides crowded trains.

“At times, I leave the subway system abruptly because my heart is racing and I just can’t breathe,” he wrote. “Never am I relaxed on mass transit any more. My eyes constantly rove around my fellow passengers looking for a person carrying a bomb.”

Federal prosecutors had asked the judge to impose life imprisonment on Mr. Ullah, who was convicted at trial in November 2018 on charges that included using a weapon of mass destruction, bombing a public transportation system and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, ISIS.

The bombing was the first attempted suicide attack in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001, and was one of several in recent years in which law enforcement has said that a lone-wolf terrorist, inspired by a foreign terrorist group, carried out an attack on civilians in the city.

Just weeks earlier, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek man, had been charged with using a truck to kill eight people in the name of ISIS on a crowded Manhattan bike path. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

On the morning Mr. Ullah carried out his attack, security surveillance cameras tracked his movements from his apartment to the subway and into Manhattan and the tunnel where he set off the device.

“Ullah’s motive was clear and unambiguous: a deeply held ideological hatred for America,” Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement after the sentencing.

Ms. Strauss’s office said in a sentencing letter to the judge that Mr. Ullah, while in jail less than two weeks after the attack, demonstrated what the prosecutors called “the depths of his radicalization, as he chillingly warned a correctional officer: ‘You started this war, we will finish it. More is coming, you’ll see.’”

At Mr. Ullah’s trial, his federal defenders did not dispute that he had detonated the bomb but told the jury that he was trying to kill himself and not harm others.

His lawyers said in their own sentencing letter that Mr. Ullah, in the fall of 2017, “was in the middle of a major depressive episode and, regrettably, searched for and ultimately found hope on the internet in the distorted messages of the Islamic State and its radical supporters.”

Mr. Ullah’s lawyers asked that he receive 35 years in prison, the minimum sentence he faced.

One lawyer, Amy Gallicchio, told the judge in Federal District Court on Thursday that her client’s actions were “no doubt abhorrent but they do not reflect his true nature.”

“They do not foretell future danger and they do not deserve a life sentence,” she said.

Mr. Ullah addressed the judge briefly, apologizing to his victims, the city, the country and others. “What I was doing was wrong,” he said.

After the hearing, Ms. Gallicchio said Mr. Ullah planned to appeal.

In arguing for life imprisonment, the government told the judge that Mr. Ullah had carried out his attack during rush hour at New York City’s busiest subway station in order to cause maximum damage and terror. His location of choice — a tunnel — amplified the bomb’s effects, the prosecutors said.

In court, Rebekah Donaleski, an assistant U.S. attorney, noted that Mr. Ullah had spent 15 to 20 days before the attack building the bomb, meticulously collecting materials from stores and a construction site where he had been working, carefully wiring the bomb and, “most gallingly,” she said, “packing the pipe bomb full of screws.”

At Mr. Ullah’s trial, another prosecutor, George D. Turner, had told the jury that all Mr. Ullah had to do to set off the bomb was touch the loose ends of a wire on his device to a 9-volt battery in his pocket.

“He acted as the trigger, the switch — he made himself part of the bomb,” Mr. Turner said.