Mentally Ill San Jose Taliban Wannabe Gets 15 Years In FBI Bank Bomb Sting

A San Jose man, who suffered from delusions that had him believing he was joining the Taliban, fell for an FBI sting operation in which he was supposed to bomb an Oakland bank last year. Now 29-year-old Matthew Llaneza is headed to prison for 15 years amid objections from his attorneys who say the FBI exploited his mental illness.

They say that Llaneza is not a terrorist threat, he’s a man who needs some serious psychiatric help.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with both the prosecutor and Llaneza’s public defender that that the man was in the grip of his mental illness when he attempted to explode what he believed was a remotely detonated car bomb near a Bank of America at 303 Hegenberger Road in Oakland on February 8 of last year.

What Llaneza thought was a deadly bomb was actually a harmless fake supplied by undercover FBI agents. The Mesa, Arizona, native who moved to San Jose a few years ago had earlier been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The bombing, he believed, would ignite a civil war, because right wing militia groups would take the blame, leading to a violent crackdown. Llaneza thought he would escape by boat to Afghanistan after the bombing where he would join the Taliban.

While prosecutors said the San Jose man “had jihad in his heart” and was a committed Islamic militant, his lawyer said he neither would have, nor could have, staged such a relatively sophisticated terror plot on his own, without the help and prodding of FBI agents who were pretending to be Taliban-connected terrorists.

“Matthew was not not a radicalized jihadist but rather a delusional, severely mentally disturbed young man,” said Assistant Public Defender Jerome Matthews. “He had no technical skills to speak of.”

They recounted Llaneza’s long history of mental illness, going back to when he was a child and experienced vivid fantasies that he was able to build a jet plane on his own and erase his memory to resist interrogation.

His attorneys also said Llaneza “had no desire to inflict mass casualties,” noting that he tried to stage the would-be bombing early in the morning when the bank building would be mostly unoccupied.

The charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, to which Llaneza pled guilty, carries a 30 year sentence, but Judge Rogers gave him half that, because of the shared conviction the the San Jose man was in need of mental health care.