Another day, another fiend planning to kill us, but Raymond Kelly and the NYPD and the FBI snuff out another threat

So this time it was a Bangladeshi who wanted to use a thousand-pound bomb on the Manhattan Federal Reserve building on Liberty St. and kill more innocent people in New York City.

This time it was Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis walking around lower Manhattan, drawing a crude map and deciding whether he wanted to put his bomb at the Stock Exchange or at the Federal Reserve. He was an enemy foot soldier in the war that does not end, no timetable for troops to be withdrawn because they never will be.

“He sees too many cops at the Stock Exchange, too much of a uniformed presence, and moves on,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said on Thursday afternoon.

This is the war being fought every day by the FBI and by the NYPD, everyone involved knowing that there is always somebody new coming along with the most murderous intentions any city in this country has ever encountered. And the heroes of the city, as great as we have ever had, are the undercover agents and the police officers who continue to stop them, catch them and put them away forever.

“It is why we’re looking at people all the time,” Kelly said. “It’s why there are investigations constantly going forward, whether one of these plots pans out or not. We are fighting this war every day. This is the place they want to come. That is their operating premise, and we haven’t been proven wrong about that.”

Nafis finally ends up in a guest room at the Millenium Hilton Hotel on Wednesday morning. Nafis, who built what he thought was a bomb in a Nassau County warehouse rented by the FBI, wanted to spark jihad using a cell phone as a detonator. He puts on dark glasses, disguises his voice and decides to make a video of himself, because he believes he is about to be a hero to his cause. He thinks he can be so much more than a foot soldier when he blows up the Federal Reserve.

Originally Nafis thinks about blowing himself up at the same time. Only now, slight change of plans, he’s decided to go back to Bangladesh, to the family that sent him to college in the United States because he told them he wanted a better life here. But he really came with dirty little ideas crawling around in his head like snakes — fantasies about bombs and murder and Al Qaeda.

The feds and the cops bust him at the Millenium. Eventually Nafis may go away for the rest of his life. Then he could draw maps of his prison cell the way he drew one of Liberty St., telling himself he was just unlucky to have thrown in with undercover agents treating him like he was dumber than rocks from the start.

Ray Kelly said, “We need this kind of teamwork (FBI and NYPD) because this threat is not diminishing, not for a long time to come. There are young people willing to risk everything to kill people here. This time it was a bizarre, twisted belief about hurting the U.S. financially in a very significant way.”

Kelly points out what the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, points out this week, that now we are talking about 15 plots like this against the city since Sept. 11, 2001. They keep coming, they get stopped, the war goes on.

One such as Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis comes here and uses college for cover, stops briefly at Southeast Missouri State University, ends up in New York, walking around the part of the city hit the way it was 11 years ago, wanting to get a building of his own, with the same kind of bomb used in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

There was a morning a year ago, a sun-splashed September morning in the runup to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. when Ray Kelly stood across from the Millenium. You would say that Kelly and the NYPD and the FBI were on high alert that week, but then they always are, as they prove again with Nafis.

Kelly pointed to the Millenium.

“Look at all those windows,” he said. “All those rooms to worry about.”

This time the end of the story played out in one of those rooms, the end of Nafis’ great plan to be famous forever, making the kind of video that so many mass murderers want to make before they start shooting innocents; or the ones who want to blow up a part of New York by punching out a number on a cell phone, thinking this was as trivial as sending a text message, just from hell.

Heroes of the city stopped him. No timetable for the end of this war, no timetable for withdrawal. A war that will last forever.