Attorney General Eric Holder on Sunday acknowledged the lapse in surveillance of Faisal Shahzad, who managed to get on board a flight for Dubai nearly 24 hours after authorities targeted him as the man who attempted to blow up a truck in Times Square.
Holder was grilled about the timeline on ABC’s This Week by host Jake Tapper, who repeatedly asked Holder what happened.
Holder told Tapper that authorities lost track of Shahzad “for just a bit of time,” adding that authorities “had a layered approach so that at the end of the day I think we were always confident that he would be picked up.”
Holder said authorities purposely kept Shahzad at “a fairly good distance,” in order to see if he would make contact with others involved in the plot.
But Tapper continued to press Holder, who finally acknowledged Shahzad had been out of sight, “Oh, I don’t know, about an hour, so maybe something along those lines.”
Tapper then suggested “we got lucky” both in finally capturing Shahzad and in avoiding a deadly explosion when the bomb failed to detonate.
“Well, there certainly was a bit of that,” Holder acknowledged. “But I think also one has to look at the overall operation. He was stopped before he was able to leave the country because of a notification that the FBI made to put him on the no-fly list. We also had vigilant citizens who looked at that vehicle that he left and saw the smoke coming out and notified the appropriate authorities.”
