Defiance over Times Square bomb

Faisal Shahzad entered the plea at the US District Court in Manhattan just days after a federal grand jury indicted him on 10 terrorism and weapons counts, some of which carry mandatory life prison sentences. He pleaded guilty to them all.

"One has to understand where I'm coming from," Shahzad told judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, who challenged him repeatedly with questions such as whether he worried about killing children in Times Square. "I consider myself... a Muslim soldier," he said.

The 30-year-old described his effort to set off a bomb in a vehicle he parked in Times Square on May 1, saying he chose the warm Saturday night because it would be crowded with people who he could injure or kill.

He revealed that he actually packed his vehicle with three separate bombs, hoping to set off a fertiliser-fuelled bomb packed in a gun cabinet, a set of propane tanks and gas canisters rigged with fireworks to explode into a fireball.

Shahzad said he expected the bombs to begin going off after he lighted a fuse and waited between up to five minutes for them to erupt.

"I was waiting to hear a sound but I didn't hear a sound. So I walked to Grand Central and went home," he said.

As Shahzad escaped the scene, two street vendors alerted police to the car which was smoking. Times Square was shut down for 10 hours. A bomb squad dismantled the explosive devices and no one was hurt.

The bomber was arrested at the last minute as his flight out of America taxied to the runway at New York's Kennedy airport. Air traffic control ordered it to return and officials removed him from the Emirates flight to Dubai, from where he was booked on a Pakistan-bound flight.

Shahzad dismissed the judge's question about the children by saying the US did not care when children were killed in Muslim countries. "It's a war. I am part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations and the Muslim people," he said.

"On behalf of that, I'm revenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their people but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

At one point, she asked him if he was sure he wanted to plead guilty. He said he wanted "to plead guilty and 100 times more".

Sentencing will be on October 5.