SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 14: Martin Stolar, defence attorney for Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 24-year-old Pakistani immigrant, who was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station, says that he was entrapped by a paid police informant who lured him into the conspiracy.

Mr Siraj was arrested days before the Republican National Convention in 2004 and held without bail. Last May, he was convicted on four counts of conspiracy, including plotting to bomb a public transportation system.

The attorney said his client had no explosives, no timetable for an attack and little understanding about explosives. He criticised the New York police’s tactics of sending informers and undercover detectives into mosques to cast a wide net in search of radical Muslims.

In an interview with the Democracy Now Radio, Mr Stolar said Ms Siraj’s story was a simple one that had been replicated across the United States.

The attorney said Mr Siraj had met the informer, Osama Eldawoody, at his uncle’s Islamic bookshop near a mosque where he used to pray. Mr Eldawoody is an Egyptian nuclear engineer who became a paid informant for the police’s intelligence division. He introduced himself as an Islamic scholar and offered to teach Mr Siraj the duties of a real Muslim.

As the pictures of atrocities in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq came out, Mr Eldawoody convinced Mr Siraj that it was the duty of a ‘true believer’ to engage in jihad, the lawyer said.

The attorney emphasised that the plot to blow up the 34th Street subway station developed as a result of the informant, who had been in the community and at the mosque for about two-and-a-half years, basically coming up with nothing until he developed the young man as somebody who was willing to engage in violence.