Al-Qaeda considered an attack on London’s Canary Wharf just weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, a British terror convict, reportedly hugged by former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and allegedly dispatched to blow up a US jetliner, said on Monday.
Al-Qaeda recruit Saajid Badat, 35, made the revelation while testifying against British cleric Abu Hamza, on trial in New York on multiple terror charges.
Badat expanded on his earlier testimony last month at the trial of bin Laden’s son-in-law, when he said al-Qaeda had an almanac of the world’s tallest buildings.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, crossed out the two towers of the World Trade Center as he leafed through the book looking for fresh targets in late 2001, Badat said.
On Monday, Badat told the US federal court that Mohammed also asked about a target in Britain.
“I believe Canary Wharf was mentioned,” Badat said, referring to the business district with a high concentration of tall buildings in east London.
Badat was allegedly ordered by al-Qaeda to blow up a US jetliner with bombs hidden in his shoes in 2001 and met one-on-one with bin Laden before leaving Afghanistan.
The meeting ended “with him giving me a hug and wishing me luck in my mission,” Badat said by video link from Britain because he faces arrest on US soil in connection with the bomb plot.
Badat spent three years from January 1999 to December 2001 in Afghanistan, where he worked for al-Qaeda.
He said he pulled out of the shoe-bomb plot, but was arrested in Britain in 2003 and served six-and-a-half years in prison for conspiracy to harm an aircraft.
According to Badat, his original intention in Afghanistan was to train for jihad and help other British recruits do the same, promising to return to Britain after six months and go to university.
He took a laptop equipped with encryption software “to encrypt messages sent back to Karachi and on to London” and an encyclopedia of jihad in CD format to help him.
He said he had orders from Babar Ahmad, who headed a group of young Muslims interested in violent jihad in London, to forge a path for other British recruits.
Ahmad, who also later spent time in Afghanistan, is being detained in the US on terror charges.
In early 2000, Badat said he “brainstormed” potential terror targets with French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui, jailed for life in the US over the Sept. 11 attacks.
Together with Moussaoui and a third man, they allegedly discussed attacking the British defense ministry and the US embassy in London.
Badat also suggested putting explosives into a small boat and crashing it into a larger ship, an idea that Moussaoui said he would mention to al-Qaeda leaders.
However, Badat refused to accept that the USS Cole attack, which used that strategy six months later, was his fault.
“If it really was, bin Laden and Abu Hafs would have come up to me and said thanks for the idea,” he said.
Badat said he saw Abu Hamza twice in London, listening to him speak at the Finsbury Park Mosque in 1997.
Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, 56, better known in Britain as Abu Hamza al-Masri, has pleaded not guilty to 11 kidnapping and terror charges which pre-date Sept. 11.
He faces the rest of his life in a maximum security US prison if convicted in the Manhattan federal court after a trial expected to last well into next month.
Blind in one eye and with both arms blown off at the elbow in an explosion in Afghanistan years ago, he sat quietly in the courtroom in black tracksuit bottoms and a navy T-shirt.
He is charged over the 1998 kidnapping in Yemen of 16 Western tourists, four of whom were killed, and conspiracy to set up an al-Qaeda-style training camp in Oregon in late 1999.
He is also accused of providing material support to al-Qaeda, of wanting to set up a computer lab for the Taliban and of sending recruits for terror training in Afghanistan.
Abu Hamza was indicted in the US in 2004 and served eight years in prison in Britain before losing his last appeal against extradition.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion