The medical student on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he plotted to set off a bomb in Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood last month.
Sami Samir Hassoun appeared with his lawyer in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Cox.
"My client is not a terrorist," Hassoun's defense attorney, Myron Auerbach, said after the hearing, according to the Chicago Tribune. "My client is a troubled young man... he's a big talker, (it was) a lot of bluster. He crossed a lot of lines you and I would not cross with his verbiage, but he talked too much."
Hassoun, a 22-year-old medical student, placed a backpack containing what he thought was an explosive device into a Wrigleyville trash can, federal authorities said on Sept. 20.
Auerbach immediately denied that his client was a terrorist and said his arrest was a case of entrapment.
"My client didn't bring anything of his own making to the incident," he said at the time. "Things were given to him."
