TERRORISM | PIPELINE PLOT AT JFK AIRPORT

Suspect in JFK airport plot tied to radical Muslim

A former official in Guyana charged with plotting to blow up fuel pipelines at JFK airport had business ties to the head of a radical Muslim group in Trinidad.

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES AND LESLEY CLARK

jcharles@MiamiHerald.com

One of the four men charged with conspiring to blow up New York City’s Kennedy International Airport was once a business partner of the head of a Muslim group that launched a bloody 1990 coup attempt in Trinidad, Guyana’s police chief said Sunday.

Acting Guyana Police Commissioner Henry Greene also said the man, Abdul Kadir, a Guyanese citizen, had a business link to Mohamed Ibrahimi, an Iranian citizen mysteriously killed in Guyana in 2004.

Kadir, two other Guyanese and a man from nearby Trinidad were accused over the weekend of plotting to blow up jet fuel pipelines and storage tanks at the airport. Terrorism experts say it’s unlikely the four could have carried out their plot.

Greene told The Miami Herald that Kadir, a former opposition member of Guyana’s Parliament, was in an export business with Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of Trinidad’s Jamaat al Muslimeen, or JAM, the radical Muslim group whose 1990 coup attempt left 24 dead.

Greene, who is leading Guyana’s investigation into the alleged plot, said Abu Bakr visited Kadir in Guyana at least once. He said he was unsure of the date of the visit but thought it was in the past two years.

Shortly after the visit, Greene said, the two men became partners in a business exporting Guyanese lumber for fencing. ”It only lasted a few months,” he said of the business.

Kadir, 55, and Kareem Ibrahim, 56, of Trinidad, were arrested in Trinidad and are awaiting extradition to the United States. Russell Defreitas, a Guyanese-born U.S. citizen, was arrested in New York. Abdel Nur, a citizen of Guyana, remains at large and is believed to be in Trinidad.

POSSIBLE MEETING

Greene’s comments bolstered reports of a link between Kadir and Abu Bakr. U.S. prosecution documents say that some of the men accused tried to meet with Abu Bakr in Trinidad to seek his support, but that only one of the suspects claimed in conversations with the others that he had indeed met with Abu Bakr.

But Greene added that there has been no evidence that Abu Bakr’s group has established a formal presence in Guyana.

Three of the accused are Shiite Muslims, and two are converts to Islam, according to media reports in Trinidad. Abu Bakr is a Sunni Muslim.

Greene said Kadir studied Islam in Iran in the 1990s and is a Shiite cleric. He established the Guyana Islamic Information Center, which hosts Islamic scholars and lecturers from overseas, including Iran. The Trinidad Express newspaper reported that he had lived in Venezuela for a short time.

Kadir was arrested at 11 a.m. Friday on a plane bound from Trinidad to Caracas. Greene said he cannot confirm comments by Kadir’s wife that he was to have picked up a visa at the Iranian Embassy in Caracas so he could attend a seminar in Iran.

Kadir ”had a following of a little over 100 people,” Greene said, and they all worshiped in a building he owned. As for the Islamic center, he said, “right now, we don’t think it’s very active.”

Greene said Kadir and the oldest of his six children, Salim Ibn Abdul Kadir, also had links to Ibrahimi, the slain Iranian who ran the Islamic College of Advanced Studies in Guyana. Iran sent investigators to Guyana to help find his killers, but no one has been charged.

”We know that Kadir and his eldest son had an abiding interest in this venture. They were linked to the business,” Greene said.

Following Ibrahimi’s slaying, the younger Kadir became director of the college, but it soon closed.

Shiites are a tiny minority in Guyana and Trinidad, where Sunnis make up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Ibrahim, the Trinidadian arrested in the alleged airport plot, is also a Shiite imam. He’s well known in Trinidad and has five children, according to the Trinidad Express. He has been selling Islamic books at Woodford Square in downtown Port of Spain, where people go to discuss the day’s political events.

POTENTIAL DAMAGE

U.S. terrorism experts doubt the Kennedy airport plot, if carried out, would have been as deadly as law enforcement officials insist.

”Nothing could be as bad as the authorities made it sound,” said Mike Ackerman, a former CIA officer who runs an international security consultancy in Miami. “The fact is that pipelines are hit all the time. The leftists in Colombia have hit pipelines dozens, probably hundreds of times, and the technology is such that sensors in the pipelines shut them down. To suggest they’d blow up half of Queens and probably all the way to Pennsylvania was ridiculous. It would have been a huge disruption, but nowhere near catastrophic proportions.”

Still, a 2006 congressional report noted that since Sept. 11, 2001, ”federal warnings about al Qaeda have mentioned pipelines specifically as potential terror targets.” Of specific concern is the Trans Alaska pipeline that delivers nearly 17 percent of U.S. domestic oil. The report notes there have been no known al Qaeda pipeline attacks, but adds that “operators remain alert.”

The half-million miles of underground pipes in the United States — and their volatile contents — pose a definite vulnerability, said Bill Hitchcock, who teaches a critical infrastructure course at Texas A&M University.

”A person who knew what to do could do a huge amount of damage, there’s no questions about it,” he said. “If someone really put their mind to doing it, I think it would be very difficult to stop it . . . I have great concerns that these things are all too plausible.”