"An informant recruited by the New York Police Department to collect
information on suspected Islamic militants has quit and denounced his police
handlers, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the case. The informant, a 19-year-old American citizen of Bangladeshi descent, was
recruited by the NYPD recently as part of an expansive intelligence-gathering
program the department launched after the al Qaeda attacks of September 11,
2001. His assignment was to make contact with suspected Islamic extremists to
try to determine if they had any inclinations to engage in violence, the source
said. On October 2, however, the informant, whom the source did not name, posted a
message on his personal Facebook page exposing himself as an informant to people
he had been in contact with. He declared that he had quit as a police
informant. "I was jus (sic) of pretending to be friends with ya cuz I honestly thought i
was fighting terrorism, but let's be real, it's all a f...king scheme," the
informant wrote, according to the source. "It was all about the money," he
added. The source said that the informant was not involved in an investigation that
led to the arrest of a Bangladeshi man last week in connection with an alleged
scheme to bomb the New York Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan."