The mother of homegrown terror suspect Jose Pimentel says she loves the city and her son. “I want to apologize to the City of New York,” Carmen Sosa, 56, said Monday in the lobby of an uptown apartment building. Muhammad Yusuf! Really? Your mama named you Jose! Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
@WiLMajor

“I love the city. I’ve been here since 1987 and I’m very disappointed with what my son was doing. I didn’t raise him that way.

“I feel very bad about the situation. I thank the police. They did what they’re supposed to do.”

Sosa said that her son’s personality began to change after 2001, when the Dominican-born U.S. citizen swapped salsa for Islam.

“He started reading about the Koran,” she said, describing how the then-teenager man began praying and sleeping a lot.

She said Pimentel’s sudden, fierce embrace of Islam prompted her to move him from upstate Schenectady to Harlem in 2010.

“I brought him here because I didn’t like the way he was acting,” she said. “I’m Catholic … I don’t support the Muslims.”

She said she knew that Pimentel, now 27, created a website — www.truislam1.com — to showcase his beliefs.

“’I’m doing business,’” he told her about the hours he spent at the computer. “He was making his own web page about what he believed.”

But she said she never saw any evidence her son was building bombs to blow up police cars and post offices.

“I don’t know what he did in the house,” she said. “I know he didn’t do it in the kitchen.”

“He said he did it by himself,” she added. “I don’t know what to do.”

Since Pimentel’s arrest, Sosa says she hasn’t been able to sleep. “I don’t feel well,” she said.

Despite her dismay over her son’s activities, she had a message for the public about him.

“I just want to say I love him,” she said.

DN