US officials said on Monday they thwarted an al-Qaida plan to detonate a ”dirty” radioactive bomb in the United States in the planning stages, before a specific target had been selected.
”It was still in the initial planning stages, it certainly wasn’t at the point of having specific targets,” said Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, after Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest in Chicago on May 8 of Abdullah al Mujahir, a US citizen who was allegedly planning the attack.
Although no target had been selected, the man had indicated some knowledge of the Washington DC area, Wolfowitz said.
”There was not an actual plan … we stopped this man in the initial planning stages,” he added.
Wolfowitz said al-Mujahir had researched nuclear weapons and received training in wiring explosives while in Pakistan.
”He was instructed to return to the United States to conduct reconnaissance operations for al-Qaida,” Wolfowitz said.
Al-Mujahir, born Jose Padilla, had been handed by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officers to the custody of the Defence Department in South Carolina, after being designated an ”enemy combatant”.
Ashcroft said Abdullah was ”exploring a plan to build and explode a radioactive dirty bomb” — a device made up of radioactive material that is highly toxic to humans and can cause mass injury and death.
Earlier on Monday, official sources said the al-Qaida man, who was detained at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport about a month ago on a material witness warrant, may have been flying into the United States to scout out targets, according to CNN. Al-Mujahir flew into the US from Pakistan.
The target would probably have been in the US capital, the channel reported. US officials said the man had been trained in the making and wiring of explosives at several locations in Pakistan.
Al-Mujahir also had two meetings with senior al-Qaida figures in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, CNN reported.
Al-Qaida is the terrorist network run by alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden that is being held responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Experts say that a ”dirty bomb” should not to be confused with a nuclear explosion, but the device could release relatively small amounts of radiation over several city blocks and have its most devastating effect in the panic it probably would create.
For that reason, it has been called an ideal terrorist weapon. A dirty bomb also is relatively easily to fashion: It uses a conventional explosive, even dynamite stolen from a construction site, to disperse radioactive material.
Abdullah al-Mujahir (31) apparently had a series of run-ins with police in his younger days. His last brush with US authorities came in Florida in the early 1990s, when he was placed on a year’s probation for aggravated assault and firing a weapon, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
He ”satisfactorily” completed his probation in August 1993, according to US department representative Sterling Ivey.
Prior to that, al-Mujahir had a number of gang-related encounters with police in Chicago where his family moved from New York City when he was five-years old, according to CNN.
But it was in Florida that al-Mujahir reportedly converted to Islam, sometime in the mid 1990s, when he was living near Fort Lauderdale, in the southeastern part of the state.
He apparently dropped out of view after leaving the US in 1998. – Sapa-AFP