New York City Subway Pipe Bomber Conviction Partly Reversed (1)

A man who was convicted for orchestrating the 2017 bombing of an underground tunnel in New York City’s subway system convinced a split federal appeals court to drop one of six counts against him.

There wasn’t enough evidence to hold Akayed Ullah liable for supporting a foreign terrorist organization, but his three life sentences stemming from the rest of his convictions remain intact, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in a Tuesday opinion.

On the morning of December 11, 2017, Ullah strapped a bomb to his chest and detonated it once arriving at the Time Square/42nd Street station. Surrounding commuters suffered injuries from the bomb’s combustion, including shrapnel wounds and hearing loss, but there were no deaths, the opinion said. After a week-long trial, a jury of New Yorkers convicted Ullah of six counts related to committing an act of terrorism and deploying a weapon of mass destruction against civilians.

Based on evidence in the record, Ullah had consumed anti-American propaganda that promoted the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and researched how to build a bomb before the 2017 attack. But there was no evidence that Ullah had communicated with the terrorist organization or used materials produced by them to make the bomb, Judge Myrna Pérez found.

“A person cannot ‘work under [ISIS’s] direction or control’ if he is acting alone, and if ISIS does not know he exists,” Pérez wrote in the majority opinion. “That Defendant subjectively conceived of himself as a soldier of ISIS does not establish that ISIS did, in fact, control or direct his actions.”

The majority relied on the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project to conclude that a person can’t be defined as “personnel” of a terrorist organization simply because “one’s actions were consistent with the group’s general, public-facing propaganda.”

Judge Jed S. Rakoff, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, sat by designation and joined the opinion.

Dissenting, Judge Steven J. Menashi said the court should’ve maintained Ullah’s conviction because the record shows he “provided or attempted to provide material support to ISIS.”

“Even if Ullah ‘did not have an ISIS contact,’ and he did not swear ‘a formal oath of allegiance to the organization, the steps he had completed were nonetheless substantial and were ‘planned to culminate’ in his support of ISIS,’” Menashi said, citing the Second Circuit’s 2019 decision in United States v. Pugh.

The Federal Defenders of New York Inc. represent Ullah.

The case is United States of America v. Ullah, 2d Cir., No. 21-01058, opinion filed 4/21/26.