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King Abdullah: Al-Qaida WMDs Came From Syria

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks.

King Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives had come from Syria, though he took pains not to implicate Syrian President Bashir Assad in the al-Qaida plot, saying, "I'm completely confident that Bashir did not know about it."

In his testimony before Congress last year, weapons inspector Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S. attack on March 19, 2003.

While Kay said investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained weapons of mass destruction, one of his top advisers described the evidence as "unquestionable."

"People below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," said James Clapper in comments reported by the New York Times on Oct. 29. Clapper heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq's WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country ruled by the Ba'ath Party.

On April 1, Jordanian officials announced the arrest of several terrorist suspects, saying they were still hunting for two cars filled with explosives.

Five days later, the State Department revealed that the attackers were linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-based terrorist considered to be one of al-Qaida's most dangerous. One of Zarqawi's targets was the U.S. Embassy in Amman.

By Saturday morning European news services were quoting an unnamed Jordanian official, who revealed that the al-Qaida plotters planned to use weapons of mass destruction in the foiled attack.

"We found primary materials to make a chemical bomb which, if it had exploded, would have made nearly 20,000 deaths ... in an area of one square kilometre," the official told Agence France-Press.

Another operation planned by the network was to use "deadly gas against the US embassy and the prime minister's office in Amman," he added.

A car belonging to the al-Qaida plotters, containing a chemical bomb and poisonous gas, was intercepted just 75 miles from the Syrian border.

Spanish officials made a direct link between the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States and the March 11 attack on trains in Madrid by indicting a Moroccan fugitive believed to have participated in both terror cases.

Judge Baltasar Garzon said Amer Azizi (search) helped organize a meeting in northeast Spain in July 2001 that key plotters in the U.S. attacks, including suspect suicide pilot Mohamed Atta (search), used to finalize details.

Azizi was initially included in an indictment Garzon handed down in September against Usama bin Laden (search) and 34 other terror suspects. Azizi was charged then with belonging to a terrorist organization.

The new indictment charges Azizi with actually helping plan the Sept. 11 attacks. Garzon accused Azizi of multiple counts of murder — "as many deaths and injuries as were committed" on Sept. 11.

The indictment was based on information provided by authorities in Britain, Turkey and the United States, Garzon said.

Azizi provided lodging for people who attended the July 2001 meeting in the Tarragona region of Spain and acted as a courier, passing on messages between plotters, Garzon said in the indictment.

The judge described Azizi as the right-hand man of Imad Yarkas (search), jailed in November 2001 on charges of leading a Spain-based Al Qaeda (search) cell that allegedly provided financing and logistics for planners of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Azizi fled Spain in November 2001, shortly after a wave of arrests that netted Yarkas and more than a dozen other al-Qaida suspects.

The Interior Ministry released a photo of Azizi this month, calling him a suspect in the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, in which 191 people died and more than 2,000 were injured.

The Associated Press contributed to this report