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This article was reported by Simon Akam, Alison Leigh Cowan, Michael Wilson and Karen Zraick, and written by Mr. Wilson.
Najibullah Zazi was escorted by U.S. Marshals after landing at a New York Police Department facility in Brooklyn on Friday.
Najibullah Zazi in Colorado, where officials say he bought materials to make a bomb.
For years, he was a fixture in Lower Manhattan, as regular as the sunrise. Every morning, Najibullah Zazi would be there on Stone Street with his pastries and his coffee, his vending cart anchored to the sidewalk.
For many on Wall Street — young, old, all in a hurry, the charging bulls of Bowling Green — his was the first hello of the day. Affable and rooted, he lived for 10 years in the same apartment with his family in Flushing, Queens. His father drove a cab for more than 15 years.
He was, in other words, no brooding outcast, no sheltered, suggestible loner raised in a closed community.
He was the smiling man who remembered a customer liked his coffee large, light and sweet. He had a “God Bless America” sign on his cart. He was the doughnut man.
But prosecutors say Mr. Zazi, 24, who worked blocks from ground zero, was just as furtive an operative as the Sept. 11 hijackers when he traveled to Pakistan last year for terrorism training and returned to the United States with a plan to build bombs using beauty supplies and backpacks.
In fact, law enforcement officials, who fret about how to seal the borders of a free society from terrorists, say they find in Mr. Zazi a particularly harrowing challenge: a homegrown operative who travels freely, who is skilled with people, who passed an airport employee background check, who understands the patterns and nuance of American life so well that he gave multiple interviews to journalists for whom access and openness rarely seem like a disguise.
“This is one of the best countries in the world,” he told a reporter by telephone on Sept. 14 after the F.B.I. had identified him as a terrorism suspect. “It gives you every single right.”
Mr. Zazi, to date, has merely been charged, not proven guilty. And vast passages of his life remain unexplored, facts and experiences that could help explain his embrace of violence or undercut the government’s disturbing portrait of him.
Even if he is proven to be the aspiring terrorist the government asserts, how and why he became one may not be understood for months, if ever. The suspects who have been charged with terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks were fueled by a variety of motivations and influences, and often a mix of them: politics, family, economic deprivation, social alienation, the work of a terrorist recruiter. Religion sometimes provides a general framework and sense of identity, but other factors and events frequently drive the transformation.
For nearly two weeks, though, the story of Mr. Zazi, now one of national interest, has lacked almost any details. A tour of where Mr. Zazi worked and lived, in New York and in Colorado, and interviews with investigators, the Zazi family and friends, provides something of a fuller picture, one filled with the routines of life in Queens but also flecked with hints of his emerging anger, contradictions and puzzles.
Mr. Zazi is both an Afghan immigrant steeped in the traditions of Islam and a kid from the streets of Queens, where his family moved in the early 1990s.
As a teenager, he often carried two things, his basketball and his prayer mat, his friends say. He grew a dark, wiry beard and began wearing tunics several years ago, just as he was applying for his first of two Macy’s credit cards.
He was a janitor and a worshiper at a mosque that split several years ago over the question of its members’ loyalty to the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks. He was a devoted fan of gadgets who married, by arrangement, his 19-year-old cousin, who lives with their two children in Pakistan.
Last summer, the authorities say, he shopped in Denver for hair supplies to build bombs with. If he did so, he was also engaged in something much more mundane: credit counseling to survive a bankruptcy he had declared in New York.
It is impossible at this moment to know what it all adds up to. But the details that are being learned create the sense of a far more complicated man than the coffee cart vendor many people saw. Certainly the government’s charges have painted the outlines of a man Mr. Zazi’s family is having a very difficult time reconciling with the Najib they knew.
Habib Rasooli, a businessman in Queens and a relative of Mr. Zazi’s, said they had no clue to the terrorist leanings, if they were real.
“If the guy was involved in all this stuff, I say, ‘O.K., bring him to justice,’ ” Mr. Rasooli said. “I’d bring him myself.”
Early Life
Mr. Zazi was born on Aug. 10, 1985, in a village in the Paktia region of eastern Afghanistan. He is a middle child with two sisters and two brothers, and his family name is shared by a tribe, one of some 500 in the region.
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