Two ISIS-obsessed Queens women were busted on terror charges Thursday for allegedly plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction in New York City — with one potential target a police funeral, authorities said.
Former roommates Asia Siddiqui, 31, and Noelle Velentzas, 28, had been planning an attack since May 2013 — and they stockpiled tanks of propane gas, along with information on how to turn them into bombs, according to a criminal complaint. “If left to their own devices, then they would have pulled this off,” a law-enforcement source told The Post.
Both women were arrested at their homes early Thursday morning on charges that could send them to prison for life. They declared themselves “citizens of the Islamic State” and said they hoped to become “real bad bitches” during conversations with an undercover officer who befriended them in 2013, court papers say.
“It’s war, it’s f–king war,” Velentzas allegedly said when all three met on Aug. 8.
Siddiqui was pals with the late Samir Khan, a former Queens resident who edited an online magazine for al Qaeda before being killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011, court papers say.
She sent a letter of support to Mohamed Mohamud, who is locked up for trying to bomb a 2010 Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., according to the Brooklyn federal court complaint.
Siddiqui also wrote a poem in the magazine Jihad Recollections in 2009 that said she “taste(s) the Truth through fists and slit throats,” the court papers say.
She also sent a letter of support to Mohamed Mohamud, who’s locked up for trying to bomb a 2010 Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., according to the Brooklyn federal court complaint.
Velentzas, meanwhile, has repeatedly called Osama bin Laden one of her heroes and used a photo of the al Qaeda leader holding an AK-47 as the background image on her cellphone, the complaint says.
On last year’s 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, she said she “hated living in the United States” and called military intervention against ISIS “tantamount to attacks on her own state,” court papers say.
She later “pulled a knife from her bra and demonstrated how to stab someone . . . if attacked,” according to the complaint. “Velentzas added, ‘Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?’ and stated that people needed to refer to them as “citizens of the Islamic State.”
During a series of conversations with the undercover officer, the women allegedly discussed previous domestic terror plots, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the failed car bombing of Times Square in 2010.
Siddiqui also told the undercover that Velentzas “has been obsessed with pressure cookers since the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013 and often makes comments about pressure cookers,” which were used to make the Boston bombs.
A day after the Dec. 20 murders of NYPD cops Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, Velentzas discussed the shootings with the undercover. She later suggested that Ramos’ funeral — which drew 25,000 cops from across the country — was an “attractive potential target,” the complaint says.
The women were held without bail pending their next court appearance on May 4.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Bain and Gabrielle Fonrouge