NEW YORK – Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis was a terrible student in his native Bangladesh, and his middle-class parents say he persuaded them to send him off to study in the U.S. as a way of improving his job prospects.

At the Missouri college where he enrolled, one classmate said Nafis often remarked that true Muslims don’t believe in violence – an image that seemed startlingly at odds with Nafis’ arrest in an FBI sting this week on charges of trying to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with what he thought was a 1,000-pound car bomb.

“I can’t imagine being more shocked about somebody doing something like this,” said Jim Dow, a 54-year-old Army veteran who rode home from class with Nafis twice a week. “I didn’t just meet this kid a couple of times. We talked quite a bit, sir. And this doesn’t seem to be in character.”