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August 11, 2006

UK: Muslim Air Terror Plot Has Echoes Of Operation Bojinka

The recent plot to detonate explosives on board nine planes bound for the United States has, according to the Scotsman, been compared to the so-called "Bojinka plot" hatched by Ramzi Yousef.

Ramzi Yousef had been the man who co-ordinated the first bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. He drove a truck into the underground car park beneath the building. This carried a 1,200 pound bomb, including cyanide. Six people died in the blast, and more than 1,000 people were injured. The cyanide was destroyed in the explosion, or the body count would have been much higher.

Five weeks after the attack, four of his accomplices were under arrest, including the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdid el Rahman. But Ramzi Yousef had already fled the country. He went to Pakistan, and tried to murder its then prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, with a bomb. The bomb blew up and he was injured. He went to Thailand, where he tried to blow up the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. But in relation to the current bomb plot, there are striking similarities to his plan which was taken on board by an Al Qaeda cell in Manila, the Philippines, called Operation Bojinka or Oplan Bojinka.

Much of Ramzi's life history is obscure, including his place of birth, which may have been Baluchistan in Pakistan, Iran or Kuwait, where his father came from. When he set the WTC bomb in 1993, he was allied to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Gamaa Islamiyah.

He was arrested in Pakistan and handed to US intelligence agents on February 7, 1995.

In May 1996, Ramzi Yousef was charged with two others in New York for the Operation Bojinka plot, before going on trial for the World Trade Center bombing. He was convicted on September 5, 1996 for Operation Bojinka. He was convicted for the World Trade Center bombings on November 12, 1997, and sentenced to 240 years in prison for his involvement in the WTC bombing, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for Operation Bojinka.

The plot of Operation Bojinka (Bojinka is the Croation word for "explosion") was even more ambitious in some respects than the recent UK terror plot, but bears striking parallels. Many of the US intelligence documents remain classified, but at the time of his trial, enough details were revealed of its scale.

The plot had been discovered by accident in January 1995 in the Philippines. A fire had broken out in an apartment in Manila, and this led to the discovery of explosives smoking in a sink. The apartment was only 200 yards from the Vatican's Filipino embassy, and Pope John Paul II was due to arrive the following week. There were maps and garments of a type worn by members of the Pope's entourage, and it was clear that a plot was afoot to assassinate the Pope.

There were computer disks, which gave details of plots to kill US soldiers. A notebook was found, including recipes for bomb-making, and Ramzi Yousef's fingerprints were on this handbook.

But the intriguing aspect of Operation Bojinka is that it would have involved eleven planes, flying out from Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore, bound for the United States. The FBI believed that Yousef even made a "trial run" of this plane bomb. He left a device under the seat of a Philippine Airline plane in December 1994 on a two-stage flight. He had assembled the device on board the aircraft on the first stage of the flight and then disembarked. It blew up a Japanese businessman, killing him and injuring 10 others.

Vince Cannistraro, former director of the CIA's Counter terrorism Division, said: "His particular, peculiar evil genius was to devise a method of putting together a liquid explosive that could not be detected by the security apparatuses in effect at most airports at that time."

He described Operation Bojinka as "Extraordinarily ambitious, very complicated to bring off, and probably unparalleled by other terrorist operations that we know of."

The chemical explosive was a liquid form of nitroglycerine, which could be stabilised with a type of cotton. The blast from a small bottle of this substance would not be enough to blow up a plane. However, if it was detonated against the cabin wall, it could rupture the fuselage of a plane.

It is possibly an explosive of this type which was detailed in the trial in Northern Ireland of Abbas Boutrab, an Algerian who was convicted in November, 2005. He was found guilty of possessing information "for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism." This information, downloaded from the internet, had involved a concealed bomb, which could fit into a bottle of baby powder, and could easily be detonated using the battery from a CD player.

An FBI explosives expert, Donald Sachtleben, told the court that he had manufactured three devices from the information held on Boutrab's disks. He said "a person of average intelligence and average mechanical skills" could make the device, which "would be likely to cause significant damage to the aircraft and cause injury or death." In a pressurised cabin at high altitude, it would "more than likely...cause catastrophic failure". Boutrab was sentenced to six years' jail.

The British shoe-bomber Richard Reid (above right) is also suspected to have used the same substance. On December 22, 2001, he was on board an American Airlines Flight 63 bound from Paris to Miami, when he began to act suspiciously, attempting to put a lighted match to his shoe. Passengers, including an American football player, subdued Reid, and the plane landed safely in Boston.

In January 2003, Reid, then aged 29, a former petty criminal, was sentenced to life imprisonment, while shouting his hatred for America. Richard Reid had apparently used plasticised TATP - triacetone triperoxide. TATP was used in the 7/7 bombs in London last year. It can be made from sulphuric acid, hydrogen peroxide and acetone.

The Scotsman notes that the US Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, mentioned Operation Bojinka in a Washington news briefing yesterday, and the UK Home Secretary John Reid said about Bojinka: "We are aware of the history books".

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is thought to be the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, is in US custody at an undisclosed location. He is said to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks, for Al Qaeda. He told interrogators that he had thought of Operation Bojinka when he suggested to bin Laden the use of planes to attack the United States.

In Operation Bojinka, the bombers were to use batteries hidden in hollowed-out shoes to detonate their liquid explosive.

What is severely disturbing about this current plot, is that an idiot like Richard Reid was able to make the explosives from items which are easily available in any high street, and the information to manufacture such devices can be easily obtained from the internet.

Richard Reid had a buddy called Sajid Badat (pictured left) from Gloucester, Britain. He was arrested on 27 November 2003. He was sentenced to 13 years' jail on April 26, 2005. He had admitted that he too had planned to become a shoe-bomber.

Though supported by the Muslim community in Gloucester, who appear to refuse to acknowledge Badat's confession and guilt, Badat showed how easy it is to create explosives. He was held in Whitemore jail near Cambridge. As we reported, he was given a role of leading Muslim prayers for a group of Muslim prisoners. In late August 2005, only four months after his conviction, a small bomb went off in his presence, and Badat was placed in isolation.

If such substances can be easily made, even in a prison, and as so many of Britain's young Muslims are vengeful and alienated from British life, the chances of a similar air-terror plot being repeated or acted upon are frighteningly probable.

Keyword: The name of the UK police operation on this plot is Operation Overt

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 11, 2006 2:44 AM

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