Forums

[Not Me]

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...top_world_news

Today's summary is based in part on admissions by Padilla since his arrest on a material witness warrant. Padilla admitted that, during a meeting in Kandahar in July or August of 2001, he was assigned an operation ``to blow up apartment buildings in the United States with natural gas,'' the statement says.

As part of his training, Padilla and another al-Qaeda operative, Adnan El Shukrijumah, also known as ``Jafar,'' worked with an explosives expert at the Kandahar airport on switches, circuits and timers, the government report says.

They ``also spent time learning how to prepare and seal an apartment in order to obtain the highest explosive yield,'' it says. That mission was apparently abandoned, according to the report, when Padilla and El Shukrijumah couldn't get along.

Padilla then turned his attention to a plot in which he would detonate a ``dirty bomb,'' or explosives wrapped in uranium or other radiological material.

Abu Zubaydah, a lieutenant to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, sent Padilla and an accomplice to present their plan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of Sept. 11, the report says. Mohammed was skeptical and urged them to pursue the original plan by entering the U.S., locating up to three high-rise apartment buildings that had natural gas, rent two apartments in each building, seal the openings, turn on the gas and set timers to detonate explosives.

Mohammed ``wanted Padilla to hit targets in New York City, although Florida and Washington, D.C., were discussed as well,'' the report says. ``Padilla now admits that he accepted the mission.''

Had Padilla been treated as a typical defendant, he probably would have followed a lawyer's advice ``and said nothing,'' Comey said. ``He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and hope, pray really, that we didn't lose him.''