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Quiet investigation centers around arrest of al-Qaeda aide in NYC
As President Bush touted his record in the war on terror Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, another front in the terrorism fight was playing out nearby in the federal holding cell of a Pakistani American named Mohammed Junaid Babar. Babar, who grew up in Queens, is a cooperating witness in an unfolding investigation of what authorities say may be a New York-based "sleeper cell" involved in Al Qaeda efforts to launch attacks in the U.S., perhaps as the Nov. 2 election approaches. The investigation remains nearly invisible to the public, and federal authorities and defense lawyers have refused to discuss it. But unsealed court documents show that Babar, 29, has admitted meeting with senior Al Qaeda members in remote South Waziristan in Pakistan this year as part of a scheme to smuggle money, night-vision goggles and other equipment to the terrorist network. On June 3, he secretly pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization and agreed to cooperate in ongoing investigations. "I understood that the money and supplies that I had given to Al Qaeda was supposed to be used in Afghanistan against U.S. or international forces," Babar told the court. Authorities believe three of the men Babar met with were involved in plotting attacks in London and perhaps the United States, using surveillance gathered during visits to New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., in 2000 and 2001. Babar's case is by no means isolated. Court documents and interviews show that U.S. authorities are conducting at least a dozen significant investigations throughout the nation into suspected support cells or operational cells of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and affiliate organizations. These investigations and dozens of preliminary probes show the extent to which Al Qaeda maintains an active support network in the United States that is linked to its leaders on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, its global network of cells and potentially to ongoing plots here and overseas, according to senior U.S. counterterrorism officials. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-09-03 |
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