Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 3, 2003
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

U.S. and Pakistani authorities have broken up an al Qaeda plan to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a suicide plot reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that shows the weakened terrorist network is still capable of pursuing serious assaults, officials said yesterday.

The plan was foiled by the arrests earlier this week in Karachi of six suspected al Qaeda members, including two who had roles in the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, U.S. intelligence officials said. The arrests led to the discovery of hundreds of pounds of high explosives, as well as grenades, assault rifles and detonators hidden in several different caches, Pakistani and U.S. officials say.

The details of the aerial assault plan, which was nearing fruition, came from the suspects themselves during interrogations by the Pakistani intelligence service, two U.S. officials said. One Bush administration official said the group had not yet obtained an airplane, but believed they were close to gaining access to one.

The information prompted an urgent analysis and warning from the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an intelligence clearinghouse run by the CIA, sources said. The Department of Homeland Security, in turn, privately issued an advisory about the plot on Thursday to pilots and airports in the United States.

Authorities said that although there is no information indicating specific plans for a similar attack on U.S. soil, the plot underscores al Qaeda's continued "fixation" on using airplanes as weapons. U.S. officials also note that al Qaeda operatives frequently aim for multiple targets.

"Recent reliable reporting indicates that al Qaeda was in the late stages of planning an aerial suicide attack against the U.S. Consulate in Karachi," said the advisory, which was posted yesterday on the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Web site.

"Operatives were planning to pack a small fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter with explosives and crash it into the consulate," it read. "This plot and a similar plot last year to fly a small explosive-laden aircraft into a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf demonstrate al Qaeda's continued fixation with using explosive-laden small aircraft in attacks."

The advisory also warned that the potential destruction from such an attack would be "the equivalent of a medium-sized truck bomb."

The notice was issued on the same day that the State Department warned Americans to avoid travel to Saudi Arabia because of "credible" information indicating al Qaeda plans for an attack on U.S. targets there. President Bush, in his address to the nation Thursday night from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, warned that "the war on terror is not over" and said al Qaeda is "wounded, not destroyed."

But authorities also said the case is further evidence of the success that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies and their allies have had in thwarting terrorist attacks.

Among the six men arrested in the raid were Tawfiq bin Attash, a Yemeni national who allegedly planned the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden, and Ali Abd Aziz, the nephew of a captured al Qaeda lieutenant who has been identified by the FBI as a key paymaster in the Sept. 11 plot.

Bin Attash, called "a major-league killer" by one CIA officer, also is believed to have played a role in orchestrating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, and attended a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Aziz is the nephew of al Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan on March 1 and is being interrogated at an undisclosed location. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III identified Aziz in testimony last year as the al Qaeda operative who wired nearly $120,000 from the United Arab Emirates to several Sept. 11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta.

Although both men were keenly sought by U.S. officials, neither was considered among al Qaeda's senior leadership until recently, officials said. The increasing number of detentions by U.S. forces has dramatically thinned the ranks of Osama bin Laden's terrorist leaders, experts said.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said the case "takes another couple of experienced al Qaeda people off the street. They don't have that many experienced people left, people who have the background in orchestrating these sorts of attacks."

But Rand Corp. terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman said the plot also shows that "al Qaeda may be down, but it's clearly not out.

"This group is still quite capable of planning reasonably destructive operations," Hoffman said. "It's not September11th level of sophistication, but it shows the enormous capacity of this organization to withstand even the severe kind of punishment we've meted out to it in the last 18 months."

Al Qaeda operatives have long developed flamboyant plans that use airplanes as weapons, a tactic used most successfully in the Sept. 11 jetliner attacks that felled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people. In another example, Khalid Sheik Mohammed helped conceive a foiled plot in the mid-1990s in which terrorists planned to blow up a dozen jetliners over the Pacific and crash a small plane into CIA headquarters in Langley.

The U.S. consulate in Karachi, a city that has been a center of militant Islamic activity, was the target of a car bombing last June that killed 12 Pakistanis but no Americans. About 28 U.S. government employees were in the building at the time. In another plot that was thwarted in December, militants had planned to ram an explosives-laden Volkswagen into another vehicle carrying U.S. diplomats.

Staff writers John Mintz, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7703-2003May2?language=printer