Free Republic

Terror mastermind lived in flat under Heathrow approach By Daniel Foggo and Massoud Ansari (Filed: 08/08/2004) An al-Qaeda "communications chief" who is believed to have been co-ordinating a plot to bomb Heathrow spent three weeks living near the airport late last year, the Telegraph can reveal. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, 25, who is under arrest in Pakistan, lived in a ground floor flat in Reading, Berkshire. The address, on Wensley Road near the centre of town, lies below a western approach flight path to the airport. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan: reconnaissance He lived there with his grandmother, Batool Begum, and...

A senior al-Qaida operative lived in New Jersey and posed as a student to disguise his surveillance of financial institutions as possible terror targets, officials said Wednesday. The FBI's top agent in New Jersey, Joseph Billy Jr., confirmed that the operative led an al-Qaida mission to survey the physical layout and assess weaknesses of the Prudential Financial Inc. building in downtown Newark. While carrying out this reconnaissance operation - which included surveys of the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street and Citigroup's headquarters in midtown Manhattan - the man attended several institutions of higher learning in New Jersey,...