Authorities have arrested a 21-year-old Bangladeshi man they say was attempting to blow up New York’s Federal Reserve building with fake explosives provided as part of an elaborate sting operation. Officials say Quazi Nafis believed he was remotely detonating a 1,000-pound bomb. On Wednesday, New York City Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly said Nafis had come to the United States to commit “some sort of jihad.”

Commissioner Ray Kelly: “This individual came here for the purpose of doing a terrorist act. He came in January of this year. He gets a student visa under the pretext of being a student in a college in Missouri, and he comes here with, again, the avowed purpose of committing some sort of jihad here in the United States. He goes to the New York Stock Exchange. He sees that there’s significant security there, and he shifts his target to the Federal Reserve Bank.”

Nafis was charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to al-Qaeda. He could face life in prison. Authorities alleged he tried to make contacts and form a terrorist cell to carry out an attack, but one of his recruits was an FBI informant who then introduced him to an undercover FBI agent. The FBI said it had controlled the “entire operation” in order to ensure public safety, a claim that’s raised the specter of entrapment. In the past, the agency has been accused of enabling and entrapping terror suspects who may have been unable to act on their own. An article in Mother Jones magazine last year examined more than 500 terrorism-related cases and found nearly half of prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by cash rewards.