An Upper East Side newsstand owner will serve six months in jail for threatening to bomb the New York Post circulation offices after the paper ran pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear.
“Why did you do the Islamic [people] that way?” Nagi Nashal, 53, admittedly said as he scolded the terrified woman who answered the phone.
“Tell them I’m going to blow the f—ing building up.”
The threat, phoned in on May 21, proved to be simply an empty temper tantrum.
But at the time, it caused panic throughout the paper’s Chelsea circulation offices. The woman who took the call was so rattled that she quit.
“This is the post-9/11 world, so everybody was shaken up,” said one supervisor, whose quick thinking helped cops trace the call to Nashal’s newsstand at First Avenue and East 72nd Street.
In Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday, Nashal stood before Justice Budd Goodman and admitted he made the threat.
“Yes, I said it,” said the slight man in horn-rimmed glasses. “But I didn’t have the means,” he added.
“You were angry?” asked the judge. “And you did it to imply you would blow up the building?”
“Yes, I was angry,” Nashal admitted.
But Nashal’s lawyer insisted his client was harmless.
“This guy couldn’t blow up his left nostril,” said attorney Marvin Greenwald.
“He’s a quiet, peaceful guy, and he works like a horse,” the lawyer said.
Greenwald has argued in past court appearances that Nashal was a model citizen, immigrating from Yemen at age 21 in the 1970s, working hard to buy and run his own stand, and regularly sending money home to his wife and eight children.
But lead prosecutor Adam Kauff has argued that Nashal’s phone call caused “a lot of hysteria.”
Nashal also tried to cover his tracks by concocting stories about how the call was actually made by an irate livery cab driver who grabbed his phone, Kauff has said.
Nashal has been ordered held in lieu of a whopping $200,000 bail by a succession of three judges – some of whom went on the record as furious at the newsstand owner’s behavior.
“He can’t threaten to blow up a major paper because they used a photograph of Saddam Hussein in his underwear!” Criminal Court Judge Anthony Ferrara railed back in May.