NEW YORK, Oct 18: The US law-enforcement agencies claimed on Wednesday to have arrested a Bangladeshi man who wanted to blow up a building in the financial district of the city.

The authorities told media personnel that Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi citizen, parked a van filled with what he believed to be 1,000 pounds of explosives outside the Federal Reserve Bank building in Lower Manhattan, near the New York Stock Exchange.

He was arrested after he allegedly tried to detonate the explosives with a cellphone.

Police said Nafis was a ‘lone player’ who thought he was about to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in support of Al Qaeda but instead discovered that he was the target of a sting operation.

Nafis faces charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and trying to provide material support to Al Qaeda.

He allegedly also threatened to kill a “high-ranking government official”, according to the federal complaint. A US official briefed on the case told the ABC News channel the target was President Barack Obama.

A report on the channel said that according to the complaint filed in a federal court Nafis came to the US in January in the hope of carrying out an attack.