Albany woman charged in ISIS-inspired plot to bomb NY Capitol

Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old Albany resident, has been charged in federal court with plotting to bomb the New York State Capitol and kill state senators, the FBI said. Agents arrested her Wednesday as she left a meeting carrying what she believed was a live explosive device and a working handgun. Both were inert, supplied by FBI confidential sources.

Bowie faces one count of attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization, ISIS, according to a criminal complaint filed August 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. She made her initial appearance in federal court Thursday.

Every step of the plot after mid-July involved people working for the FBI, and no functioning weapon or explosive was ever in Bowie's hands. For more than a month, Bowie communicated with confidential sources who posed as ISIS facilitators, prosecutors said. They drove her to buy bomb-making supplies at a hardware store, showed her a device they said was built from those materials, and handed her an inert firearm and an inert explosive before agents arrested her on August 19.

A convert who pledged allegiance to ISIS

Bowie converted to Islam about five years ago and began going by the name Aisha Saif, according to court documents. Investigators say social media accounts linked to her posted material supporting ISIS and terrorist violence from May into July 2026, at times under the username nusaybahsaif. In a stretch between May 8 and May 30 she asked how to formally pledge allegiance to the group and sent audio recordings of that pledge on May 28 and May 30.

According to the complaint, her stated motive grew from a belief that laws being passed in New York were an affront to Islam. In messages cited in the complaint, Bowie said she wanted to destroy as much of the building as possible and kill the senators while they met, and that she hoped they would lose important documents. She wanted the plot, she said, to 'destroy some of the taghut,' a Quranic term for a false god or idol that jihadists use for governments and rulers they consider illegitimate.

On May 28, using a username tied to her, Bowie told another user, 'Praise be to Allah for September 11th,' and 'When I can migrate, I will poison these infidels,' according to the affidavit. She later told an informant she had gone from a little girl waving an American flag after the 2001 attacks to keeping stickers of the falling towers.

Federal prosecutors said Bowie discussed traveling to join ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and intended to flee there after the attack, ideally in a way that let her get away and board a plane. On July 16, she began communicating on an encrypted messaging application with an FBI confidential source she believed was an ISIS facilitator, the first documented undercover contact in the case.

A bomb hidden in a delivery bag

Bowie's target was the Capitol in Albany, and she wanted to strike while the state Senate was sitting, prosecutors said. The Legislature had been out of session since June and was not due back until January, and she appears not to have realised lawmakers were not in the building. She told a source she had learned the Capitol could hold as many as 200 people and hoped to take out at least half of that, and dismissed a smaller attack, saying she did not want to risk killing only two or three people.

She planned to carry the device inside in a DoorDash bag so she would look like a food delivery worker, according to the complaint. Asked at one recorded meeting whether it would trouble her if bystanders died, she said it would, 'especially if there's a Muslim, if there's children, pregnant women.' She also arranged to buy a firearm and ammunition to shoot at any police officer or security guard who tried to stop her.

Investigators recorded her surveillance of the Capitol at least five times between July 21 and August 9, according to the affidavit. She took dozens of photographs, some from an observation hall nearby, and on July 21 walked the grounds photographing the building and sent the images to a confidential source. On later images she circled the spots she intended to target.

We definitely want to make sure the senators get killed for sure. That's the most important part. Destroying the building too? That's, that's ideal ...

The threat did not stop at the Capitol. Bowie told the sources she would return after fleeing the country to carry out more attacks, naming Times Square on New Year's Eve as a possibility and discussing the White House and the president, the FBI said. She decided attacking the White House would be too difficult and said she would revisit it later. The affidavit says she also weighed Albany City Hall before settling on the Capitol, because lawmakers there write the laws.

Undercover informants and a Home Depot run

Three FBI confidential sources, posing as ISIS operatives, communicated with Bowie over roughly five weeks without her knowing they worked for the bureau, according to the complaint. On July 31, one asked whether she wanted help from a 'trusted brother from Dawlah,' Arabic for 'the State' and shorthand ISIS supporters use for the group. Bowie agreed, and the source arranged an in-person meeting that brought two more into the plan.

On August 5, Bowie met two of the sources in Albany, and they drove her to a Home Depot in Rensselaer. Using $200 in pre-recorded government funds one of them had given her, she bought nails, electrical tape, a 9-volt battery and acetone, materials the sources told her were needed to build the bomb.

Back in the car, Bowie commented that the nails would work as shrapnel and asked whether they were big enough, prosecutors said. The next day she handed the sources DoorDash bags she said could conceal the device.

The sources had convinced Bowie that one of them was an active ISIS member and that a purported ISIS supervisor had been told about her plot, according to the complaint. Prosecutors date the charged conduct from July 16 to August 17, two days before her arrest. Her final documented surveillance of the Capitol was on August 9.

The final meeting and the arrest

Bowie met the sources again on August 19. She paid $150 for what she believed was a handgun, a magazine and ammunition, and was shown an inert explosive device the sources said had been assembled from the supplies she bought. Both the gun and the device were inert, built so they could not function.

She also handed over a $200 donation to the purported bomb maker to fund, in her words, the construction of additional devices for future operations, the complaint said. FBI agents arrested her in Albany after she stepped out of the sources' vehicle, carrying the inert gun and explosive.

On Bowie, agents found knives and a handwritten pledge of allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI. She was advised of her rights, waived them and spoke to agents, telling them, 'There's no helping me, you guys know enough.' She has no prior arrests and is being held at the Schenectady County Jail.

Officials call it an attack on democracy

Craig Tremaroli, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Albany field office, said Bowie sought more than the deaths of lawmakers. He described her aim as a complete disruption of government and said she had stated a clear desire to carry out an attack at the New York State Capitol.

Ms. Bowie did not just plan to kill lawmakers, she wanted a complete disruption of our government.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III said Bowie had plotted to use an explosive device to attack the Capitol and the state senators, calling the allegations in the complaint 'deeply disturbing' and the plan 'an attack on democracy itself, and one we will not tolerate.' He said the announcement would 'have a chilling effect on anyone in this country who is being radicalized or considering acts of violence.'

Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement that she was 'grateful to the FBI for leading this investigation and to the New York State Police for their work to apprehend this dangerous individual.' She said the state had strengthened security at the Capitol earlier this year 'amid a rise in political violence and threats against public officials,' and that there was 'no immediate threat at this time.'

What comes next in the case

FBI Special Agent Joshua Parker filed the sworn affidavit supporting the complaint on August 20 in the Northern District of New York. It traces a path that began in early May, when investigators say her online support for ISIS first surfaced, through her first undercover contact on July 16, to her arrest two weeks after the Home Depot trip.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that the bureau had 'already disrupted 400+ such attacks at home and around the world' in 2026. The figure is the FBI's own and has not been independently verified. Sarcone called ISIS 'perhaps one of the most vicious organizations that is hell-bent on murdering Americans, destroying our democracy and disrupting our very own way of life.'

Bowie was detained pending further proceedings after appearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel J. Stewart on Thursday. The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Ryan D. White of the Justice Department's National Security Division counterterrorism section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Richard Belliss and Joseph Hartunian of the Northern District of New York.

A criminal complaint is an accusation, not a conviction, and the allegations against Bowie have not been tested in court. No plea is taken at this stage, and the Federal Defenders office in Albany, which is representing her, declined to comment.