3 arrested in terror plot at JFK airport, official says

The main thing is, if that's true - it's unislamic to harm innocents purposelly.

format_quote Originally Posted by Lina

Yeah right.

"Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow...they love JFK -- he's like the man. If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice," one of the suspects said during a recorded phone conversation, officials said.
CNN

That's exactly what a 'terrorist' would say when planning this huge attack on American soil, that's what he would say to one of his 'terrorist buddies' over the phone, to his buddies, over the phone.

Exactly.


EXACT!

''Wow man...like...this would be like...so awesome....!''
Was the missing sentence.

Ze3ma Ze3ma.

Salaam,

That is soo funny,do people really talk that way?

But lets see,is there any entrapment going on..

Remmebr the last time they caught the 3 guys trying to attack an army base,,one of the poeple who COAXEd them were CIA spies..

So let see.

All this tell me that the US need a second Sep 11 to "awaken" american to support any idiocy that the Bush adminsitrtion has in its plans

Second,the war is expanding and hopefully people will realise that as long as you target other ,you will be target back..

BLOWBACk,,search google..

format_quote Originally Posted by Zulkiflim

Salaam,

That is soo funny,do people really talk that way?

But lets see,is there any entrapment going on..

Remmebr the last time they caught the 3 guys trying to attack an army base,,one of the poeple who COAXEd them were CIA spies..

So let see.

All this tell me that the US need a second Sep 11 to "awaken" american to support any idiocy that the Bush adminsitrtion has in its plans

Second,the war is expanding and hopefully people will realise that as long as you target other ,you will be target back..

BLOWBACk,,search google..

Zulkifilm;

Your comments seem internally inconsistent. On the one hand, you immediately posit "entrapment" as an explanation...then you go on to say this is what the US should expect because of Bush's policies.

So which is it? Seems to me you cant have it both ways.

Also for the "stop calling it Islamic terrorism" crowd.....note that the words "Muslim" or "Islam" are not mentioned until the 12th sentence of the story and it is not in the headline at all..

If charged they should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. Don't bother executing them.

Its a good thing they we caught in the early stages.

If they suceeded thousand of people could have been killed.

As it turns our nobody was killed. Inshallah!

-

As it turns our nobody was killed. Inshallah!

your attempt at a joke?
LIke you said it was a good thing they were caught.don't want to imagine what would have had happened if they succeeded.Woirldwide ban of Islam I guess.

They aimed to kill thousands

BY JOHN MARZULLI, JAMES GORDON MEEK, ALISON GENDAR AND ROBERT F. MOORE

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Sunday, June 3rd 2007, 4:00 AM

Four extremists hatched a plot to blow up Kennedy Airport and swaths of Queens by attacking fuel tanks and an underground petroleum pipeline - in hopes of igniting a catastrophic explosion that would eclipse 9/11, authorities said yesterday.

One of the Muslim men, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen who had worked for a cargo company at the airport, boasted to an informant that "he had a vision that would make the World Trade Center attack seem small," authorities said.

"The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable," said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf.

The ringleaders were identified as radicals with ties to Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Three suspects, including a former member of the Guyanese parliament, have been arrested. The fourth was still being sought.

Defreitas, 63, was busted at the Lindenwood Diner in Brooklyn late Friday. He allegedly told a federal informant that Kennedy Airport, which handles an average of 1,000 flights a day and 45 million passengers a year, was chosen because of its economic importance - and symbolic connection to the slain President.

"They [Americans] loved John F. Kennedy like he's the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice," he said, according to authorities.

The bearded defendant, wearing a knee-length, olive-green tunic with matching pants, looked tired and did not enter a plea yesterday during a brief appearance in Brooklyn Federal Court. A patch featuring the continent of Africa and a lion was sewn into one of his sleeves.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Knox called Defreitas the homegrown extremist behind the chilling terror plot whose goal was "to kill as many people as possible."

The group's original plan was to crash an airplane into other passenger jets on the ground at Kennedy "to create a catastrophic explosion," a source said.

When the suspects couldn't recruit enough co-conspirators, the source said, they came up with a new plan: to set off explosions at the airport's fuel farm, a series of storage tanks.

They also were targeting a massive fuel pipeline that runs 40 miles from Linden, N.J., through Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, providing fuel to JFK.

They hoped an assault on the so-called Buckeye pipeline - which carries 8 million gallons of jet fuel and refined petroleum into the city every day - would kill thousands by causing explosions throughout residential areas.

But the pipeline owner and experts said yesterday an explosion at one section of the artery would not cause a chain reaction.

Investigators said the cabal - which had ties to Jamaat al Muslimeen, an extremist Muslim group in Trinidad and Tobago - had not yet bought explosives but posed a credible threat. The suspects had taken video of the airport and obtained satellite photos using Google Earth software, authorities said.

The group "was very familiar with the airport and how to access secure areas," a source said.

The alleged plotters were identified as Defreitas, a divorced U.S. citizen originally from Guyana who lives in East New York, Brooklyn; Trinidadian national Kareem Ibrahim; Abdul Kadir, a former member of the parliament and former mayor of a city in Guyana, and Abdel Nur, also from Guyana.

Ibrahim and Kadir - who was photographed in 2005 meeting with Guyana's president - were in custody in Trinidad and Tobago. Authorities believe Nur is hiding in the Caribbean.

Kadir, who left his parliament position last year, has connections in Iran, where his son attended school, a counterterrorism official told the Daily News. He had code-named the plot "The Chicken Farm," authorities said.

"Defreitas provided the know-how about JFK. Kadir provided the contacts and possibility for financing," Mauskopf said. "It was a potentially deadly combination."

But any links to established terror networks were unclear.

"There are a couple of shadowy figures in the background," a source said. "Whether those Al Qaeda connections were real or not, we don't know."

At a meeting last year with an informant, Defreitas confided that "he had a vision that would make the World Trade Center attack seem small," the complaint said.

The suspects were under surveillance for a year before the arrests were made here and overseas.

"We had them on conspiracy long ago," a law enforcement source said, adding that the feds didn't move in more quickly because they wanted to see whether the probe targets had ties to Al Qaeda.

Defreitas, who was ordered held without bail yesterday, told an informant in January that he was motivated to attack Kennedy Airport because while working there years ago for Evergreen International Aviation, he saw missiles being shipped to Israel. He told the informant he believed the missiles would be used to kill Muslims, authorities said.

Defreitas "wanted to do something to get those *******s," apparently referring to Jews and the U.S., the criminal complaint said. He also allegedly said he had been taught to make bombs in Guyana.

Authorities decided to round up the suspects because some of them were expected to travel soon.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the NYPD had conducted an in-depth survey of the 40-mile pipeline, and police helicopters and boats were closely patrolling the artery of fuel.

"We have to remain vigilant. ... If we learned anything from this latest plot, it's that they keep coming back to New York," Kelly said, adding that he and Mayor Bloomberg had been kept updated during the probe.

The investigation was conducted by the FBI, NYPD, Port Authority Police and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Kadir's wife, Isha, told The News in Guyana last night that her husband was arrested Friday as he boarded a flight from Trinidad to Venezuela. He had planned to pick up a visa in Caracas so he could travel to Iran for an Islamic conference, she said.

She admitted her family had been associated with the Jamaat al Muslimeen group in Trinidad about 20 years ago, shortly before its failed 1990 coup attempt.

But the mother of eight, who lives about 70 miles southeast of Guyana's capital, insisted, "At no time in our home do we ever think about bombing or doing anything to hurt the United States of America."

format_quote Originally Posted by Keltoi

Glad they stopped this plan, although their plan was probably not workable the intent was obviously there.

Yes..these guys appeared to be the "B-team". The "A-team" entered early retirement.

Peace To All

Papers Portray Plot As More Talk Than Fiction

By MICHAEL POWELL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
June 4, 2007
The New York Times

The plot as painted by law enforcement officials was cataclysmic: A home-grown Islamic terrorist had in mind detonating fuel storage tanks and pipelines and setting fire to Kennedy International Airport, not to mention a substantial swath of Queens.

“Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction,” Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, said in a news release that announced charges against four men. She added at a news conference, “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded are just unthinkable.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly then stepped to the lectern with a vision only a bit less grim.

“Once again, would-be terrorists have put New York City in their crosshairs,” he said. Mr. Kelly said a disaster had been averted.

But the criminal complaint filed by the federal authorities against the four defendants in the case...suggests a less than mature terror plan, a proposed effort longer on evil intent than on operational capability.

(Ms. Mauskopf noted in her news release that the “public was never at risk” and told reporters that law enforcement “had stopped this plot long before it ever had a chance to be carried out.”)

At its heart was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little money, uncertain training and no known background in planning a terror attack.

...Some law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading.

The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, also suggests that at least two of the suspects had some ambivalence.

One of the men was game for bombing the airport but leery about killing masses of people, the complaint says. Another dropped out of the plot for a time to tend to his business.

...No one would second-guess the authorities for pursuing and arresting suspected plotters. An enduring lesson that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have taught prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the danger of inaction.

But as with many post-9/11 terror plots, the line between terrible aspiration and reality can get lost in a murky haze.

In case after case, from what authorities said was a dirty bomber to the Lackawanna Six, federal prosecutors hail arrests of terrorists and disruptions of what they describe as sinister plots.

But as these legal cases unfold, the true nature of the threats can come into question.

Ms. Mauskopf and Mr. Kelly declined yesterday to discuss their characterizations of the airport case...

Neal R. Sonnett, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor who was chief of the criminal division in the United States attorney’s office in Miami, congratulated the F.B.I. for fine police work in what was clearly “a prosecutable case.”

But he said: “There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too loudly about such cases.”

“It has a bit of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight to it,” Mr. Sonnett said. “It would have served the federal government well to say that.”

The seeming gap between the rhetoric at Saturday’s news conference and the reality of the threat could reflect a change in approach among law enforcement officials.

...But the same papers give reason for doubt about the competence of the suspects. The details tend to suggest a distance between Mr. Defreitas’s dream and any nightmarish reality.

There is, too, the question of the role played by the unidentified undercover informant who befriended Mr. Defreitas.

The informant is a convicted drug trafficker, and his sentence is pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government, said the authorities.

It was to this informant, according to the authorities, that Mr. Defreitas first confided his “vision that would make the World Trade Center attack seem small.”

The complaint notes that the defendant “did not discuss the details.”

...Another problem is that none of the suspects appears to have planned or carried out any previous attacks.

Nor do the men appear to possess relevant military training.

One defendant, Abdul Kadir, is said to have warned the others that the Islamists in Trinidad “had their own rules of engagement and wanted to minimize the killing of innocents such as women and children.”

He suggested an early-morning assault to take out buildings rather than people, the complaint says.

...But Mr. Sonnett, who also is a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, noted that there is a broader risk in overstating the sophistication of a terror plot.

At a time when many Americans live in justified fear of an attack, the risk is that drumbeating creates a climate of fear and drives public policy.

“To the extent that you over-hype a case, you create fear and paranoia,” he said. “It’s very difficult for prosecutors and investigative agencies to remain calm.”

To Read The Complete Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/ny...gewanted=print

Zaccarias Moussoui was part of a "gang that couldn't shoot straight".

The second wave of subway bombers had duds. The first wave didn't.

The idotic "pilot" of flight 73, when the plane was inverted (flying upside down) over the Pennsylvania countryside (as the passengers rushed the cabin hoping to kill the murdering sob and take control of the plane) pushed forward on the wheel trying to crash the plane. Normally, this would work, but because he wasn't a real pilot, he was too stupid to realize it would actually cause the plane to gain altitude. Guess,what, everyone died anyway.

it wasnt really a threat, the media blew everything out of proportion. it was jst a plot or maybe even an idea who knws. its all a propaganda by the west to instill fear in the minds of innocent pple. wht was the motive of the so called suspects????????????

I'm sure if thoes that did 7/7 was caught on 7/6, there would be people here who would want to play it down.
Why would anyone want to defend or play down those who want to do great evil.

Alleged Plot's Damage Would Have Been Limited

Jet fuel doesn't explode easily, experts say, and fire would not have spread along airport pipelines.

By Megan Garvey
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2007

Complete Article:
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/f...atimesA29.html

format_quote Originally Posted by Zman

So does that make it OK? Why do you defend thoes that want to kill your country men?