Terrorist shoe bomber Richard Reid said his plot failed because that was what God wanted,
according to NBC News.
Nevertheless, he said that be believes his 2001 attempt to kill 197 passengers on an American Airlines flight was justified under Islamic law.
"I admit many people would dispute that and disagree with me on that point," Reid wrote in a letter to a researcher from a Colorado prison where he is serving his life sentence.
"However, at the same time I also believe that it wasn't supposed to happen, not because it was displeasing to God … rather because it was not either my time to die nor that of those on the plane with me, and he had other plans for me which include my staying in prison and other matters which I may not be aware of as of yet."
Reid's plan failed in-flight when an attendant saw him trying to light a fuse coming from his shoe and concealing a plastic explosive. Fellow passengers subdued him and he was sedated by two doctors on board the flight from Paris to Miami.
The researcher who has been corresponding with him for a book she hopes to write, Dr. Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, asked him whether he had any regrets, NBC News reported. Reid told her that he wishes he had planned the attack better.
"I do have some tactical regrets of a sort which I won't go into here, but I don't regret losing my freedom," he wrote.
In another letter between the two, Reid commented on the Paris terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.
"I do not see what happened at Charlie Hebdo as a tragedy," he said, according to NBC News. "Rather the tragedy is that people think it is OK to demean the sacred and belittle that which is more beloved to we Muslims than their own souls."
He added: "And as the saying goes, if you play with fire you might get burned, so I have no tears for those who insult Islam."
Mehlman-Orozco runs a nonprofit called Justitia Institute and has corresponded with several convicted terrorists. She said the letter demonstrates the process that occurs once radicalization has taken place, in that militants continue to believe their distorted version of Islam even after being isolated for years.
"It withstands the cost versus the benefit, it withstands the will to live, it withstands years in the toughest prison in America," she said, according to NBC News.
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