#Victor Alvarez, conspirator in 1993 NYC terror plot, set for release

Enlarge Image

A New York City police car sits by the barricades while police officers assist a pedestrian in lower Manhattan, 1995.
Henny Ray Abrams/Getty Images

A would-be terrorist convicted in a fiendish plot to bomb New York City landmarks is set for release from prison on Thursday — and could be headed straight for a Manhattan homeless shelter.

Victor Alvarez, 54, has finished serving a 30-year sentence for conspiring with the late, blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman to blow up the various Big Apple bridges and tunnels, as well as the United Nations and local FBI headquarters.

His crimes included helping stir diesel fuel and fertilizer for what the feds called a “witches’ brew” that was found inside a makeshift bomb factory in Queens when it was raided in 1993, disrupting the terror scheme.

Abdel-Rahman and nine followers, including Alvarez, were found guilty in 1995 following a nine-month trial that included audio and video recordings secretly made with the help of bodyguard for the radical Egyptian cleric after he became an informant for the FBI.

Manhattan federal prosecutors have asked a judge to impose a host of restrictions on Alvarez before he’s released from custody, citing “documented mental health issues” that “contributed to [his] radicalization and violent behavior.”

“These issues continued to contribute to violent and disruptive behavior when the defendant was incarcerated,” according to court papers.

“Between 1993 and 2013, the defendant received 155 prison disciplinary reports, including for assaulting, spitting on, and threatening officers, possessing a weapon, flooding his cell, and keeping containers of urine and rotten milk in his cell.”

Alvarez’s mental state improved after he began being “involuntarily medicated” in 2013, but Alvarez “has told prison doctors that he does not intend to continue taking psychiatric medication upon his release from prison,” prosecutors wrote.

“Compounding the likelihood that the defendant will not take the measures needed to treat his mental illness, the [Bureau of Prisons] reports that the defendant has ‘no address’ in New York City, and will be ‘homeless’ upon his return to this district,” according to court papers.

Earlier this month, prosecutors asked that Alvarez be ordered to spend his first year of freedom in a halfway house, saying that otherwise, “the BOP plans to bring the defendant to the Bellevue Men’s Shelter” in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood.

But in court papers filed Tuesday, prosecutors modified that request and said Alvarez could instead submit a plan for approval by the US Probation Office to live in a “residence, which may include a shelter.”

A court hearing in the matter is set for Thursday afternoon.