A federal appeals court on April 21 rejected a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist’s bid for a reduced sentence over his role in a thwarted bombing plot targeting Manchester, England—linked to other planned attacks in the United States and Denmark—affirming that a lower court acted within its discretion by denying a new sentencing hearing.
In a summary order issued Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with the U.S. government, finding that a district court judge was justified in denying the resentencing proceeding for Abid Naseer, a Pakistani national convicted in 2015 for conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda and other crimes.
Naseer was originally sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 2022, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie vacated one of Naseer’s convictions—using a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence—after the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the legal definition of such crimes in United States v. Davis.
As a result, the court reduced Naseer’s sentence from 40 years to 30 years but declined to conduct a full resentencing hearing.
The Second Circuit’s April 21 ruling affirms the revised 30-year sentence and rejects Naseer’s argument that he should have been resentenced from scratch. The court concluded that the district judge’s long-standing familiarity with the case and the absence of new mitigating factors made a full hearing unnecessary.
Naseer’s case—tried in Brooklyn federal court following his extradition from the United Kingdom—stemmed from his role in a 2009 plot to detonate explosives in a crowded shopping center in Manchester, England. U.S. prosecutors described the attack as part of a coordinated, three-pronged terrorist operation targeting Western cities, with linked plots aimed at the New York City subway system and a newspaper office in Copenhagen, Denmark.