DETROIT — A Nigerian man pleaded guilty Wednesday to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear, defiantly telling a federal judge that he acted in retaliation for the killing of Muslims worldwide and referring to the failed explosive as a “blessed weapon.”
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who acknowledged working for al-Qaeda and never denied the allegations, entered the plea against his attorney’s advice on the second day of his trial. He stands to get a mandatory life sentence for the 2009 attack that aimed to kill nearly 300 people on Christmas Day over Detroit.
Abdulmutallab calmly answered the judge’s questions and read a political statement warning that if the United States continues “to persist and promote the blasphemy of Muhammad and the prophets,” it risks “a great calamity . . . through the hands of the mujahedeen soon.”
“If you laugh at us now, we will laugh at you later on the day of judgment,” he said.
Abdulmutallab suggested more than a year ago that he wanted to plead guilty but never did. He dropped his four-person, publicly financed defense team in favor of representing himself with help from a prominent local lawyer appointed by the court, Anthony Chambers.
In an interview, Chambers said Abdulmutallab privately renewed his interest in a guilty plea Tuesday before the start of the trial.
The government said Abdulmutallab willingly explained the plot twice, first to U.S. border officers who took him off the plane and then in more detail to FBI agents who interviewed him at a hospital after he was treated for burns to his groin.
There also were photos of his scorched shorts, video of Abdulmutallab explaining his suicide mission before departing for the U.S. and scores of passengers who could have been called as eyewitnesses.
A woman who sat six rows in front of Abdulmutallab on the plane said the guilty plea provided her with “relief.”
“It was disheartening and sickening, however, to listen to Abdulmutallab explain why he feels his actions were justified,” Hebba Aref, a Detroit-area native, wrote in an e-mail. “As a Muslim myself, I know that he has a completely erroneous and distorted interpretation of the Quran.”
Abdulmutallab, the well-educated son of a wealthy banker, told investigators that he trained in Yemen, home base for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He said he targeted a U.S.-bound flight at the urging of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, American-born Muslim cleric recently killed by the U.S. military in Yemen.
