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A Bangladeshi man who tried to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank with a 1,000-pound bomb only to discover that the bomb was a fake and that he had been under constant federal surveillance was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Friday. The man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 22, came to the United States in January 2012 on a student visa with plans to carry out a terrorist attack, the authorities said. His attempts to find assistance on the Internet led him to an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Beginning in July 2012, the agent met repeatedly with the Mr. Nafis as Mr. Nafis developed his plot. Last October, the two assembled a bomb, which Mr. Nafis believed to be real, placed the explosive in a van and parked the van outside the bank in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Nafis tried several times to detonate the device using a remote-controlled trigger before agents arrested him. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. At the sentencing hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Nafis, Heidi C. Cesare, asked the judge, Carol B. Amon, for a sentence below the recommended minimum of 30 years. Ms. Cesare said that Mr. Nafis endured a tough childhood in Bangladesh, suffering beatings from his parents and ridicule from his peers for his pronounced stammer. Ms. Cesare described Mr. Nafis as a vulnerable and isolated young man who fell prey to radicalized Muslims in Bangladesh. And she pointed to Mr. Nafis’s expressions of remorse since carrying out the attempted attack. Judge Amon said she did not believe that Mr. Nafis was a hardened terrorist and accepted his remorse as genuine. But Judge Amon said, “That does not change the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing.” He had faced a sentence of life in prison. Mr. Nafis, a slight figure with a boyish face, sat sunken in his chair and hardly responded to the sentence. He whispered briefly with Ms. Cesare before the federal marshals led him out of the courtroom. Click This Link