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Canadian linked to New York terrorism plot
A terrorist plot against New York involved at least one Canadian currently held in custody overseas, an FBI source knowledgeable about the investigation said Friday. The suspect is one of eight people — three of them in custody — who investigators allege were planning suicide attacks on heavily used commuter tunnels leading to southern Manhattan. Now it seems that the man pegged as ringleader of the alleged plot attended Concordia University in Montreal for several years in the mid-1990s, says a source familiar with the case.

Authorities had been monitoring the group for more than a year on websites popular with Islamic extremists and feared they would attack within months. A report about the alleged plot, and arrests that occurred in Beirut in April, were published Friday in a New York tabloid, which prompted officials to reveal that they headed off a possible strike on tunnels from New York to New Jersey. “Plotting for this attack had matured to a point where it appeared that the individuals were about to move forward,” Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director Mark Mershon told a news conference. “They were about to go to a phase where they would attempt to surveil targets, establish a regimen of attack and acquire the resources necessary to effectuate the attacks. At that point, it's entirely appropriate to take it down.”

It was not clear Friday where the Canadian suspect now being held in an undisclosed foreign country fit into the picture. The alleged leader of the plot, Lebanese native Assem Hammoud, may have lived in Montreal at one point. In footage aired by CBC, his mother said he had visited there with a Canadian girlfriend. And sources told CTV that a Montreal man suspected of involvement in the plan was detained in Lebanon on April 6 and interrogated by the FBI. One counterterrorism expert who had been briefed on the plan, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media, told the New York Times: “These are bad guys in Canada and a bad guy in Lebanon talking, but it never advanced beyond that.”
Posted by: Fred 2006-07-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=158621