AN alleged jihadist arrested in June on charges that he plotted to blow up Times Square may also be the man who stabbed a nine-year-old New York boy in the neck five months earlier in what some investigators now believe was a botched ISIS audition.

But New York police investigating the January 9 knife attack have been frustrated by the FBI, who won’t give them access to terror suspect Fareed Mumuni, said a source familiar with the case.

Mumuni, 21, lived only 500 metres from Jermaine Culver, who was stabbed as he walked to school in the Mariners Harbor section of New York’s Staten Island.

A surveillance camera on a home across the street captured a stocky attacker as he stalked the boy from behind before grabbing him around the neck and stabbing him in his back, head, neck and arm.

The nine-year-old is seen stumbling a few steps before he regains his footing and runs.

“It looks like he’s trying to kill that kid,” said Luis Padilla, 44, the home’s owner. “He went straight for the jugular.”

Following the savagery, Culver was afraid to leave the hospital. The shell-shocked boy was eventually sent to live with an aunt in Atlanta.

“But he’s alive and fine and well,” said his 21-year-old brother, Shawn Williams.

Williams said the family remains in the dark about his case a year later.

“We still don’t know,” he said. “It seems like the cops gave up on it.”

In the days after the attack, police distributed fliers reading, “Wanted for Assault 1,” with a surveillance photo of the attacker running away. The New York Police Department also stationed a mobile command unit in the area.

“They came up with less than zero,” the source said.

Police got their first break in the case when federal agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force foiled an alleged four-man, New York-New Jersey terror operation in June. The group had been under surveillance since at least April.

Munther Omar Saleh, 20, of Queens, was arrested on June 13 and charged with plotting to use a pressure-cooker bomb to attack Times Square or One World Trade Centre. He had also been spotted surveilling the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan.

Mumuni, who was studying social work at the College of Staten Island, and Saleh, a student at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in Queens, had met multiple times in May, according to court documents.

They were captured on phone recordings and “exchanged electronic communications in which they discussed attacking members of law enforcement,” the papers say.

Four days after Saleh’s arrest, the task force descended on Mumuni’s home at 6.35am to execute a search warrant.

Mumuni tried to bury a kitchen knife in an agent’s chest, police said. The blade was stopped by the agent’s body armour.

Mumuni, court documents say, “espouses violent jihadist beliefs.” He allegedly told police that he had pledged allegiance to ISIS and that if he failed to join the group in the Middle East, he planned to attack police.

Investigators believe that if Mumuni was the man who knifed the young boy, the attack could have been Mumuni’s audition for ISIS.

“If you look at the video, it looks like he was trying to slit his throat,” the source said.

Police want to quiz Mumuni in the assault, describing the purported jihadist as a “person of interest”.

He has a physical “similarity to the description in the video, he lived three blocks away, and he likes to play with knives and attempted to stab a federal agent,” the source said.

Mumuni’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, could not be reached for comment.

Additional reporting by Michael Oates