Police foil plot to 'car bomb Times Square in New York'

Police stopped an international terror plot to cause bloodshed at New York City concert venues, subway stations and Times Square, officers said. One of the defendants, Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, was arrested after travelling from Canada to New Jersey in May 2016 to stage the attacks, according to police. The capture of the Canadian citizen came after an investigation using an undercover FBI officer posing as an Islamic extremist that also led to the arrests last year of US citizen Talha Haroon in Pakistan and Russell Salic in the Philippines, where he is a citizen. According to court papers, El Bahnasawy, 19, sent the undercover officer an image of Times Square with a smartphone message saying, "We seriously need to car bomb times square. Look at these crowds of people!" In another, he expressed a desire to "shoot up concerts cuz they kill a lot people. ... We just walk in with guns in our hands. That's how Paris guys did it," the papers said, in an apparent reference to the slaughter by men armed with weapons at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015. The undercover officer and El Bahnasawy also were in communication with the 19-year-old Haroon, who wanted to join El...