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Malaysia holding members of the would-be West Coast terror cell
Malaysia is holding several members of an al Qaeda suicide cell that U.S. President George W. Bush says planned to launch a Sept. 11-style attack on Los Angeles, a security official familiar with the case told Reuters.The plot to hijack a plane and fly it into Los Angeles' tallest building was set in motion a month after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and was thwarted in early 2002, according to Bush. A Southeast Asian intelligence official said at least three members of a Southeast Asian cell earmarked to carry out the attack on the West Coast were being held in Malaysia under the Internal Security Act, which allows detention without trial. "One guy was given money to go for pilot training," said the official, who has proven reliable in the past. He said the would-be pilot, Zaini Zakaria, was arrested in 2002, and the others were probably chosen to play supporting roles in the hijacking. Members of the cell fled to Malaysia from Afghanistan after the United States began bombing al Qaeda and Taliban forces there in October 2001. "They were told to... await instructions. They were supposed to meet up again to carry out a second (suicide airliner) operation," the official said. Diplomats say security agencies in mostly Muslim Malaysia were very cooperative in sharing counter-terrorism intelligence information with their U.S. counterparts after Sept. 11, 2001. Malaysia is holding 66 detainees suspected of links to al Qaeda and and its Southeast Asian branch, Jemaah Islamiah. The Malaysian government declined to comment. "We don't comment on detainees or divulge information concerning detainees," a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said. According to Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, the West Coast plot was initially to have been part of the Sept. 11 attacks. But al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden decided to focus on the East Coast as it was too difficult to get operatives for both. The planned attack on Los Angeles was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is in U.S. custody. The hijack team was recruited by Jemaah Islamiah commander Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was arrested in August 2003 near Bangkok and is also in U.S. custody. The hijackers were to use bombs hidden in shoes to breach the cockpit door of an airplane before flying it into Los Angeles' 1,017-feet (310-metre) high Library Tower, now the US Bank Tower. The cell was broken and the arrests made between 2002 and 2003. "It was a legit plot," said Ken Conboy, a Jakarta-based security expert who has written several books on defence, intelligence and security issues. "Whether they would have been able to get these guys actually in the States is another deal. "It was envisioned as a second wave after 9/11, and he (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) wanted to use Southeast Asians because he thought they could get into the U.S. and hijack the planes more so than Arabs because the U.S. would be more on alert to Arabs after 9/11," Conboy said. In December 2001, Malaysia made its first breakthrough against al Qaeda in Southeast Asia with the arrest of Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain, who recently returned from Afghanistan. Sufaat hosted two of Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, when they passed through Kuala Lumpur almost a year before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. He is also believed to have supplied money and travel documents in Malaysia to Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who was arrested in the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui denies he was to have participated in the Sept. 11 strikes but says he was part of a broader conspiracy to conduct subsequent attacks. Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-02-12 |
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