Bangladesh citizen Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis came to the U.S. in January 2012 on an F-1 student visa to study cybersecurity at Southeast Missouri State University. His middle-class parents had sent him to a private school in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, but when he underperformed they decided to send him to a U.S. school as a means to put him on a better career trajectory. State Department officials at the U.S. embassy in Dhaka would have vetted him during their review of the F-1 visa during 2011.
But FBI counterterrorism investigators were the ones who discovered in the summer of 2012 that Nafis was already fully radicalized in violent jihad when he entered the United States on his F-1 visa and intending to conduct a terrorist attack, according to prosecutors and media reports. When he entered, for example, he brought with him bomb-making instructions and speeches by Anwar al-Awlaki, a now-deceased propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
He also immediately set about trying to recruit multiple individuals to form a terrorist cell for al-Qaeda, federal authorities later discovered and alleged. One fellow student noted that Nafis had spoken admiringly of Osama bin Laden.
“Nafis came to the United States radicalized and bent on fighting jihad here in our homeland,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in an August 2013 statement.
In a 2013 letter to the federal judge overseeing his case, Nafis wrote that “At my university in Bangladesh I did not have any real friends. So, when the radical students, who were influential and famous, were nice to me I fell for them easily.”
In fact, court records and New York Times reporting explained that “famous and respected” jihadists at his private college in Dhaka successfully had recruited him to violent jihad prior to his U.S. entry on the visa, and this was well known among Nafiz's family and associates. Any security vetting for the F-1 student visa might reasonably have discovered that he was dangerous had it included interviews of those in Nafis’ family, social, and school circles, in Bangladesh, where State Department personnel conducted the security vetting.
Nafis’ true intentions came to light in July 2012 because one of those he tried to recruit into his terrorism cell was an FBI informant, which led to an elaborate sting operation.
Nafis withdrew from his Missouri school after one semester and moved to New York City to conduct his terror attack, enrolling in a Brooklyn college for cover and working as a busboy at a Manhattan restaurant. With undercover FBI informants now in on his plans, Nafis considered killing a high-ranking U.S. official before settling on using a purported 1,000-pound bomb to destroy the New York Federal Reserve Bank. In a statement claiming responsibility for what he believed would happen to the bank, Nafis wrote that he wanted to “destroy America” by striking a blow at its economy. But Nafis also expected to kill women and children, citing quotations from “our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden” justifying such killing.
State Department officials later defended their security vetting by saying the process mainly includes checking various U.S. government databases and fingerprint records “on a case-by-case basis”, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the time.
But in the Nafis case, any evidence of his radicalization likely would have required more thorough methods beyond running database checks in case derogatory reporting on an individual was not yet known.
“The suspect did have a student visa to attend a legitimate academic program in the United States, for which he was qualified,” Nuland was quoted saying.
In 2013, Nafis was convicted of terrorism offenses and sentenced to 30 years in prison.