Women charged with plotting terrorist bombing

NEW YORK – Two women were arrested Thursday on charges they plotted to wage violent jihad by building a homemade bomb and using it for a Boston Marathon-type attack.

One of the women, Noelle Velentzas, had been “obsessed with pressure cookers since the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013” and made jokes alluding to explosives after receiving one as a gift, according to a criminal complaint.

The complaint unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn names Velentzas and her former roommate, Asia Siddiqui, as the targets of an undercover investigation into the thwarted homegrown terror plot.

The women, both from Queens, were held without bail after a brief court appearance.

The women repeatedly expressed support for violent jihad during conversations with the undercover, who secretly recorded them, according to the complaint.

In 2009, Siddiqui, 31, wrote a poem in a magazine published by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula that declared there is “no excuse to sit back and wait – for the skies rain martyrdom,” investigators wrote in court papers. Velentzas, 28, called Osama bin Laden one of her heroes and said she and Siddiqui were “citizens of the Islamic State,” investigators said.

Since 2014, the pair plotted to build an explosive device to use in a terrorist attack on American soil, the complaint says. They “researched and acquired some of the components of a car bomb, like the one used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; a fertilizer bomb, like the one used in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City; and a pressure cooker bomb, like the one used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing,” authorities wrote.