British police have charged eight terrorist suspects with conspiring to commit murder and use radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals or explosives to cause "fear or injury" in a case involving an alleged top al-Qaeda operative at the center of a US terror alert this month.
US Attorney General John Ashcroft said that federal authorities were determining whether to press charges in the United States against the men, including the top al-Qaeda suspect accused of having surveillance plans of financial institutions in New York, Washington and New Jersey.
Tuesday's charges for the first time officially linked the Aug. 3 arrests across Britain and a series of arrests last month in Pakistan to the Aug. 1 terrorism alerts surrounding the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup Inc headquarters, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington, and the Prudential Financial Inc building in Newark, NJ.
Ashcroft said the Department of Justice had been working closely with British authorities and that FBI agents and analysts would continue sharing information.
"In addition, prosecutors from the Justice Department's Counterterrorism Section and the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan will explore every aspect of this case and evaluate whether additional charges, including potential charges in the United States, are approp-riate," Ashcroft said in a statement issued from Washington.
A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 32-year-old Dhiren Barot was the key al-Qaeda suspect charged with possessing the surveillance plans. Barot has previously been identified as Abu Eisa al-Hindi or Abu Musa al-Hindi.
US counterterrorism officials have said that they believe Barot, known by dozens of aliases including Issa al-Britani, was the author of documents, written in fluent English, describing surveillance at US financial buildings during 2000 and 2001. The information was found on computers and in e-mails during the July raids in Pakistan.
Barot was described as a trusted senior al-Qaeda operative who was sent in early 2001 to do surveillance on possible economic and ``Jewish'' targets in New York on the orders of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, according to US interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Pakistani officials said this week that Barot, known as a veteran of the Islamic militant battle against Indian forces in Kashmir, also traveled this past March to a militant hideout near the Pakistan-Afghan border and met with other terrorist suspects.
According to the British police charges, Barot; Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 24; Abdul Aziz Jalil, 31; Omar Abdul Rehman, 20; Junade Feroze, 28; Zia ul Haq, 25; Qaisar Shaffi, 25; and Nadeem Tarmohammed, 26, were accused of conspiring "with other persons unknown" to commit murder between January 2000 and Aug. 4, 2004.
The eight also were charged with conspiring between the same dates to cause a public nuisance by using radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals and/or explosives to cause "disruption, fear or injury."
Barot and Tarmohammed were charged separately with possessing a reconnaissance plan of the Prudential Building in violation of the Terrorism Act.
Barot was charged with possession of notebooks containing information on explosives, poisons, chemicals and related matters, and of a reconnaissance plan concerning the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund, and the Citigroup building in New York.
Following the Aug. 1 terror alert involving those buildings and the World Bank in Washington, the US government acknowledged it had no evidence of plans for imminent attacks.
Shaffi was charged with possessing an extract from the "Terrorist's Handbook" containing information on the preparation of chemicals, explosive recipes and other information.
A ninth man, Matthew Philip Monks, 32, was charged with possession of a prohibited weapon.
The eight men were due to make a first court appearance yesterday at Belmarsh high security prison in London.
Mudassar Arani, a lawyer representing seven of the men, said they had been psychologically abused through being held in solitary confinement and in some cases stopped from reading the Koran, and claimed one had been hit in the face by police when he was arrested.
The Aug. 3 arrests sparked fears of a plot to attack London's Heathrow Airport, but the airport was not mentioned in the charges against the men.
The British raids were linked to the July arrest in Pakistan of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a computer engineer and al-Qaeda suspect, US and Pakistani officials have said.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
SCAM CLAMPDOWN: About 130 South Korean scam suspects have been sent home since October last year, and 60 more are still waiting for repatriation Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were yesterday returned to South Korea to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad. The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won (US$33 million), South Korea said. Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations. Local TV footage showed the suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, being escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South
A former flight attendant for a Canadian airline posed as a commercial pilot and as a current flight attendant to obtain hundreds of free flights from US airlines, authorities said on Tuesday. Dallas Pokornik, 33, of Toronto, was arrested in Panama after being indicted on wire fraud charges in US federal court in Hawaii in October last year. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday following his extradition to the US. Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, then used fake employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets reserved for pilots and flight attendants on three other
RSS