Osama wanted follow-up attacks to 9/11, says shoe bomber | Albuquerque Express

Osama wanted follow-up attacks to 9/11, says shoe bomber

Albuquerque Express Tuesday 24th April, 2012

• Badat had met bin Laden shortly after Sept 11 attacks

• He was convicted in a 2001 plot to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes

• Badat is free after serving six years of an 11-year prison sentence

NEW YORK - Saajid Badat, a British man who trained to be a shoe bomber a decade ago, says Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden had told him he believed that a follow-up terrorism attack to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks could bring down the American economy.

In a videotaped testimony played Monday for a federal jury in Brooklyn, Badat recounted his meeting with bin Laden shortly after the Sept 11 attacks.

"So he said the American economy is like a chain," Badat said. "If you break one - one link of the chain, the whole economy will be brought down. So after Sept. 11 attacks, this operation will ruin the aviation industry and in turn the whole economy will come down."

Badat, 33, was convicted in London in a 2001 plot to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes.

He said bin Laden had himself dispatched Badat to board a plane with a bomb sewn in his shoe, which he was to detonate in midair as part of choreographed attacks.

However, he did not follow through with the attack. He hid the equipment under his bed in Britain.

Ten years later, Badat testified by video to his role in the shoe-bombing conspiracy in the terrorism trial of Adis Medunjanin, a Queens man who is accused of joining a separate plot to blow up Manhattan subways in 2009.

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