Would-be Chicago Backpack Bomber Gets 23 years

A federal judge has sentenced a Lebanese immigrant to 23 years in prison for placing a backpack he believed contained a bomb along a bustling street near the Chicago Cubs' baseball stadium.

Sami Samir Hassoun was sentenced Thursday, little more than a month after the Boston Marathon bomb attack.
The 25-year-old former baker pleaded guilty last year to dropping the backpack into a trash can outside a bar packed with late-night revelers across the road from Wrigley Field in 2010. FBI undercover agents had given him the bag.

The defense depicted Hassoun as a uniquely gullible youth sucked into the sting during an alcohol-addled stretch of his life by an informant eager to please his FBI handlers.

But prosecutors say he declined repeated opportunities to back out of the plot.