British prosecutors revealed the details of a terrorist plot to blow up high-profile financial targets — including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund headquarters in downtown Washington — during a sentencing hearing of a top al-Qaida operative Monday.
Dhiren Barot, 34, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit mass murder on both sides of the Atlantic in a London court. He was back in the heavily guarded Woolwich Crown Court to admit his part in the London plots and in the conspiracies of back-to-back explosions in D.C., New York and New Jersey.
Authorities submitted the terrorists’ business plans that investigators found in a computer after Barot’s arrest in 2004.
The proposals each had blueprints and photographs of the financial buildings, attack methods and ideas on how a terrorist could gain access. An 80-minute New York reconnaissance film was spliced into a videotape copy of the Bruce Willis action movie “Die Hard With A Vengeance.”
Barot wrote that the attacks would produce “another black day for the enemies of Islam and victory for the Muslims,” according to prosecutors.
The U.S. bombings were planned before Sept. 11, 2001, and shelved due to the success of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but they were then resurrected and were still being worked on as late as February 2004, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors showed clips of the reconnaissance video of New York taken by Barot in 2001. The shaky footage zoomed in on the World Trade Center as an unseen man mimicked the sound of an explosion. However, prosecutors said Barot did not have prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed an estimated 2,973 people.
Barot is wanted in the United States on charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Under British law, domestic proceedings take precedence over an extradition. He also is wanted in Yemen for the 1988 kidnappings of Westerners.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
