US charges four in planned attack on New York's JFK airport
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| Published on Saturday, June 30, 2007 |
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NEW YORK, USA (AFP): The United States charged four men Friday with conspiring to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at New York's John F. Kennedy International airport.
A grand jury at the US district court in New York charged Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahim, former Guyanese parliamentarian Abdul Kadir, Guyana native Russell Defreitas, who worked at the JFK airport terminal, and Abdel Nur, another Guyanese, with plotting between January 2006 and June 2007 to bomb the airport.
The four "did knowingly and intentionally conspire to unlawfully deliver, place, discharge and detonate an explosive and other lethal device in, into and against a public transportation system ... with the intent to cause death, serious bodily injury and extensive destruction," the indictment read.
Five counts of conspiracy to bomb the airport and one for surveillance of the airport, which sees 125,000 people pass through every day, were filed against each of the four in the plot. They were all arrested earlier this month in the United States and in Trinidad.
The plot was exposed by US authorities on June 2, and US justice officials at the time said the four had links to international Islamist terrorist cells in the Caribbean and South America.
The indictment Friday made no mention of such links, but said that the four had conspired "together with others" in the plot, without providing details.
Defreitas will appear before a judge on July 11, said Manhattan prosecutor Robert Nardoza.
The other three men, arrested in Trinidad, are facing extradition to the United States to be tried.
At the time of their arrests, Defreitas was alleged to have said in a conversation recorded by an US agent who had infiltrated the group that blowing up the airport would have been of great symbolic importance and like killing late US president John F. Kennedy again.
"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States," he allegedly said. "They love John F. Kennedy like he's the man .... If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning.
Defreitas allegedly used his knowledge of airport operations to identify targets and escape routes, and assess airport security, while also using satellite photographs of the airport downloaded from the Internet.
In another alleged conversation, Kadir, an engineer by training, explained to the others that the fuel tanks would require two explosions -- a comment suggesting the plotters had some technical expertise.
However, some US experts at the time of the arrests played down the possibility that the men could have wreaked major damage, saying it would have been next to impossible to cause an explosion in the airport's jet fuel tanks and pipelines.
John Goglia, a former member of National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the plot had ever been carried out, it would likely have sparked a fire but little else, and certainly not the mass carnage authorities described.
"You could definitely reach the tank, definitely start the fire, but to get the kind of explosion that they were thinking that they were going to get... this is virtually impossible to do," he told AFP.
Critics also pointed out that the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.
Neal Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor, told the New York Times in early June that there was also a danger in overstating how serious or sophisticated a plot really was.
"There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too loudly about such cases," he said. "To the extent that you over-hype a case, you create fear and paranoia," he said.
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