- LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's
Sunday Times quoted two leading members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network
as saying the initial plan for the September 11 hijackers had been to crash
planes into nuclear power plants in the United States.
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- This had been rejected for fear "it would get out
of control," but future nuclear targets were not ruled out.
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- The newspaper was quoting from a documentary by Yosri
Fouda, chief investigative reporter for the Arab television station al-Jazeera,
who interviewed Ramzi bin al-Shaibah and Khaled al-Sheikh Mohammad in Pakistan's
port city of Karachi. The date of the interview was not given.
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- Qatar-based Jazeera television showed the first part
of the documentary last Thursday. It plans to air the second part next
Thursday, which it said would include confessions by the two men that al
Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks.
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- More than 3,000 people were killed when hijacked airliners
devastated the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and smashed
into U.S. military headquarters at the Pentagon near Washington.
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- The Sunday Times quoted the men as saying in the "recent"
interview that the fourth target had been Capitol Hill in Washington. But
the airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
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- An official at Jazeera told Reuters the station had not
been aware that the Sunday Times was going to run an article with details
from the documentary, nor was he aware Fouda was going to write a by-lined
item about how he got the story.
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- "We were not planning to release anything before
Thursday (Sept 12)," the official said.
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- The newspaper identified Sheikh Mohammad, 38, as head
of the al-Qaeda military committee, and Shaibah, 30, as coordinator of
the operation from his base in Germany. It said Sheikh Mohammad had devised
the idea of targeting "prominent" buildings in the United States.
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- "DEPARTMENT OF MARTYRS" RECRUITS
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- The hijackers who died in the crashes were recruited
from al Qaeda's "so-called Department of Martyrs."
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- "The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths
as possible and to be a big slap for America on American soil," Sheikh
Mohammad was quoted as saying.
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- The Sunday Times said Shaibah had also written a 112-page
justification for the attacks, entitled 'The Reality of the New Crusaders
War', which he wanted translated into English and lodged with the Library
of Congress in Washington.
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- "In case that the events which took place in America
were the doing of Muslims, then it is legal because those operations were
against an enemy state.
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- "It is permissible for Muslims to kill infidels
under a principle of reciprocity, because if those infidels are targeting
Muslim women, children and the elderly, then the Muslims can do the same,"
the Sunday Times quoted the document as saying.
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- The newspaper said the opening page included pictures
of the World Trade Center as it collapsed, on a day described by Shaibah
as "that glorious Tuesday."
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- It said the decision to launch a massive suicide attack
on the United States was taken with bin Laden's approval by the al Qaeda
Military Committee in early 1999.
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- It said Mohammed Atta, the leader of the suicide mission
had been a network "sleeper" in Germany since 1992 and was called
to a meeting of the military council in the summer of 1999. It said Yemen-born
Shaibah had shared an apartment with Atta in Hamburg.
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- The Sunday Times said "one of their agents also
claimed that bin Laden was "alive and well," although he provided
no evidence."
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- Jazeera told Reuters last Thursday the interview was
arranged by an al Qaeda liaison officer identified by the channel as Abu
Bakr and contained "confessions."
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- The Sunday Times said Sheikh Mohammad was an uncle of
Ramzi Yousef, now serving a life sentence in the United States for the
first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
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