Posted on 08/11/2004 6:37:49 AM PDT by areafiftyone
A Queens man has admitted meeting with a high-ranking member of al-Qaida in Pakistan in a scheme to smuggle money, night-vision goggles and other equipment to the terrorist network, officials confirmed Tuesday.
The terror suspect, Mohammed Junaid Babar, secretly pleaded guilty in June to multiple charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization. He agreed to cooperate with authorities as part of a plea deal.
According to a court transcript made public on Tuesday, Babar told a judge he met with an unidentified al-Qaida official earlier this year in South Waziristan, a tribal area near the border of Afghanistan. He said he and others had provided money, goggles, sleeping bags and other goods to the terrorist group beginning in 2003.
"I understood that the money and supplies that I had given to al-Qaida were supposed to used in Afghanistan against U.S. or international forces," he said.
Babar, 29, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, also described arranging lodging and transportation for recruits to a "jihad training camp" and providing ammonium nitrate and other materials for a bomb plot in London.
The plot to blow up pubs, restaurants and train stations was foiled in late March, when British authorities arrested eight suspects and seized 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer -- which can be used to make explosives -- from a storage locker in London.
U.S. authorities had previously refused to comment on reports about the guilty plea in federal court in Manhattan.
A call to Babar's attorney was not immediately returned Tuesday.
Babar, who grew up in New York, was put on a terror watch list after authorities became aware of inflammatory remarks he made to a television reporter in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Babar said that despite the fact his mother had escaped from the ninth floor of one of the World Trade Center's towers, his loyalty was "to the Muslims, not the Americans." He also announced his intention to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"I'm willing to kill Americans," he said in the televised interview, adding that he had no plans to return to New York.
In April, Babar returned to New York, where police and FBI agents put him under surveillance and eventually arrested him.
Babar, who was being held without bail, faces up to 70 years in prison. No sentencing date was set.
I wonder if he shopped using "Sportsman Guide?"
Wonder who he will vote for in November????
Lord!!!!!
Get these people OUT of our Country!!!
I agree with you. I see more and more muslim schools opening up here in Queens. They just recently took over a storefront and it is now a school for children. One day I walked past it and they had their doors open and the poor kids were in the heat, with no AC having to rock back and forth reciting the Koran for hours. Sickened me to see those kids having to act like zombies. Who knows what hatred they preach there. Also there is a Madrassa school not too far away. Plus another Muslim school.
Whoops. What an idiot.
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