Thaindian News

Washington, May 13 (IANS) Al Qaeda had planned attacks on US nuclear power plants, airports and even the Brooklyn Bridge after 9/11, Pakistani terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his interrogators, according to WikiLeaks.

Telling interrogators that Al Qaeda had planned to create a “nuclear hell storm”, Mohammed, who claims to be the mastermind behind the Sep 11, 2001 attacks gave up a chilling laundry list of attacks in the works, CNN reported citing the latest WikiLeaks revelations.

Mohammed seemed to be busy conjuring up many terror plots as a follow up to the 9/11 attacks before his capture, according to the leaked classified government documents and risk-assessment files on Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks in which planes crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Mohammed said, he began to plot an attack on Heathrow Airport in London.

According to the documents, he told interrogators there were two primary cells for the attack, one based in Britain tasked with obtaining pilot training from a commercial flight school in Kenya, and another in Saudi Arabia, assigned to identify people willing to martyr themselves in the attack.

In late 2001, Mohammed was hatching a plan to hijack a commercial airplane and have it flown into the “tallest building in California”, according to the documents, most of which were released by WikiLeaks April 24. He planned using at least two shoe bombs to gain access to the cockpit, the documents say.

Then in April 2002, the documents say, Mohammed thought about hijacking cargo planes and simultaneously flying them into several airport terminals across the US. He asked Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris for help, telling him to study ways of entering cargo areas of airports.

Faris also was crucial to Mohammed’s plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the suspension cables, according to the documents.

The video game Sega also played a role in Mohammed’s plans. The documents say he discussed the use of Sega game cartridges as remote-controlled firing devices. The devices were found during a raid on Karachi in September of 2002, according to the documents.

The CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants in the US, and the tallest buildings in Washington state also made Mohammed’s potential target list.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)