Asian airliners were also targets in original Sept. 11 plan: Repots

Asian airliners were also targets in original Sept. 11 plan: Repots

Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press, Kuala Lumpur

The mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks originally conceived a two-part plan that included hijacking airliners in Southeast Asia and blowing them up in mid-air as planes crashed into their targets in New York and Washington, U.S. investigators say.

Al-Qaeda leaders also considered crashing hijacked planes into American targets in Japan, Singapore or South Korea as part of a "scaled-up" version of what became the Sept. 11 strikes, according to a staff report to the U.S. congressional committee investigating the attacks.

Osama bin Laden rejected the Asian part of the plan because it would be too hard to coordinate with the U.S. side, says the document, one of two reports into al-Qaeda's operations and the Sept. 11 plot released on Wednesday in Washington and posted on the Internet.

The report, citing information gleaned by U.S. interrogators from alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, reveals a much wider role for Asia in the 2001 attacks than was previously known.

Mohammed, a Kuwaiti who claims to have first proposed flying commercial airliners into high-profile targets in the United States to bin Laden in 1996, is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location after being captured in Pakistan last year.

In the mid-1990s, Mohammed was based in the Philippines and was a key figure in the so-called "Bojinka" plot to blow up 12 U.S. airliners over the Pacific. The plot fell apart when Philippine authorities discovered the bomb-making equipment in January 1995.

Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators that in 1996 he pitched several ideas to bin Laden to attack the United States, including a "scaled-up" version of the Sept. 11 attacks, the report says.

The U.S.-based part involved suicide hijackers, 10 planes and targets on both coasts. The second part was a revived and modified version of the Bojinka plot, the report says. "Operatives would hijack U.S. commercial planes flying Pacific routes from Southeast Asia and explode them in mid-air instead of crashing them into particular targets," the report says. "An alternate scenario, according to (Mohammed), involved flying planes into U.S. targets in Japan, Singapore or Korea.

"All planes in the United States and in Southeast Asia, however, were to be crashed or exploded more or less simultaneously, to maximize the psychological impact of the attacks," the report says.

Mohammed met with bin Laden again in 1999 to develop a list of targets, and bin Laden assigned four al-Qaeda operatives - Saudi citizens Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar and Yemenis Walid Muhammed bin Attash and Abu Bara al-Yemeni- to the plot, it says.

After undergoing specialized training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan, the four traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where they held meetings in January 2000.

In Malaysia, Attash and al-Yemeni were "directed to study airport security and conduct surveillance on U.S. carriers" and al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were "to switch passports," the report says.

The al-Qaeda operatives were hosted in Kuala Lumpur by Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian better known as Hambali, and Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and chemical engineer.

Both were senior members of Jamaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia, and had received training in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan, the report says.

From Malaysia, Attash, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar traveled to Bangkok, Thailand, for further meetings.

From Bangkok, Attash flew to Hong Kong aboard a U.S. airliner with a box cutter - the hijacking weapon used on Sept. 11 - hidden in a bathroom bag. He later admitted to "casing" the flight in preparation for the Asian hijacking plot, the report says.

But in April or May of 2000, "bin Laden decided to cancel the Southeast Asia part of the plan's operation because he believed it would be too difficult to synchronize the hijacking and crashing of flights on opposite sides of the globe," the report says.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar traveled from Bangkok to the United States, where they eventually became two of the hijackers aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Attash became involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. It is not clear what happened to al-Yemeni.

Scores of suspected members of Jamaah Islamiyah have been jailed in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines in a regionwide anti-terrorist crackdown over the past three years. Most are alleged to have plotted or assisted in locally organized attacks in the region, including the 2002 nightclub bombings on Bali island that killed 202 people.