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Posted on 08/15/2004 8:10:13 PM PDT by FairOpinion
NEW YORK - American and Pakistani authorities fear a 'second string' of Al-Qaeda leaders is plotting a major new attack after a terrorist summit in Pakistan, Time magazine reported.
Some United States officials fear the meeting could have been a key planning session ahead of a major attack, similar to the way a 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur was ahead of the Sept 11 terror attacks in the US.
'The personalities involved, the operations, the fact that a major explosives expert came here and went back,' Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told the magazine, 'all this was extremely significant.'
A US official described the participants at the event in March in the north-western province of Waziristan as 'cold-blooded killers who are very skilled at what they do and have an intense desire to inflict an awful lot of pain and suffering on America'.
They included Abu Issa al Hindi, an Indian convert to radical Islam and surveillance specialist living in Britain; Adnan el Shukrijumah, a commercial pilot and bomb-maker of Arab-Guyanese origin; and Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American who arrived at the summit with cash, sleeping bags and ponchos, the magazine said.
Al Hindi and Mohammed Babar are under arrest in London and New York respectively. Others, including Shukrijumah, are at large.
Shukrijumah, 29, 'speaks English and has the ability to fit in and look innocuous', an FBI agent told Time.
'He could certainly come back in the United States, and nobody would know it.'
FBI agents said he could be the next Mohamed Atta - a reference to the ringleader of the Sept 11 attacks. -- AFP
The March 2004 terrorist summit in the lawless province of Waziristan, described to TIME by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last week and expounded on by U.S. officials, has become a subject of obsession for authorities in both countries. "The personalities involved, the operations, the fact that a major explosives expert came here and went back," Musharraf said, "all this was extremely significant."
I would really like to know why the venue of this meeting wasn't turned into a steaming pile of rubble during said meeting...
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