Holder admits strong link to Al Qaeda

Here's how the AP reporters Colleen Long and Michael Rubinkam reported on Faisal Shahzad last Thursday:

The Pakistani-American accused of the failed Times Square car bombing is believed to have been working alone when he began preparing the attack almost immediately after returning from his native land, authorities said Wednesday.

They said they have yet to find a wider link to extremist groups...

One law enforcement official told the AP that authorities don't believe there are any other suspects in the plot and that several arrests in Pakistan in the past two days were not related.

Taliban "intimately involved" in attack

Now this breaking news from the NY Times (via Memeo link):

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news program “This Week.”

Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the Taliban in Pakistan “directed this plot” and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was “intimately involved” in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just yards from the heart of Times Square.

The Times ads:

Mr. Shahzad, a resident of Bridgeport, Conn., who spent five months in Pakistan until February, was working for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The TTP is believed by some military intelligence officials to have joined forces with Al Qaeda and may be hiding some of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden, who was the motivating force behind the 9/11 attack.