Reply #32: add to the mix: Man Told FBI of Al Qaeda Training in 2000 - Reports [View All]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A year and a half before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a British Muslim told the FBI (news - web sites) that he was trained to be a hijacker for Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and was in the United States to carry out attacks, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.


Reuters
Slideshow: September 11




Niaz Khan, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, said in interviews that instead of meeting his contacts in New York, he went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, gambled away his money, then turned himself in and confessed.


Khan told NBC and The Wall Street Journal that he was lured into joining a group of Islamic radicals in Britain who offered to pay his gambling debts and was trained to hijack planes at a camp in Pakistan.


A congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks confirmed that in April 2000 an unnamed "walk-in" source told FBI agents in Newark, New Jersey, that he "was to meet five or six persons," some of them pilots, who would take over a plane and fly to Afghanistan (news - web sites), or blow up the plane, NBC said.

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more: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=5&u=/nm/20040604/ts_nm/security_qaeda_training_dc