The airline bombing plot that British officials said they disrupted Thursday bears striking similarities to a 1995 plot hatched by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, in the Philippines.
In that earlier plot, small liquid nitroglycerin bombs were to have been carried aboard as many as a dozen American airliners in East Asia, assembled in flight and timed to explode -- killing all aboard as the aircraft headed east over the Pacific toward the United States.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday August 12, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction
Manila bomb plot: An article in Friday's Section A said Philippines bomb plotters Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were of Pakistani ancestry. They are Pakistani citizens.
Given passenger loads on the targeted jumbo jets, several thousand people might have died had the plan been carried out. It was disrupted just days before Mohammed and Yousef apparently intended to set it in motion, but not before Yousef had exploded a small test bomb aboard a Philippine Air flight, proving conceptually at least that the plan could work.
The Manila bombs, designed by Yousef, were similar to those thought to have been planned for the British attack in that they were made of relatively innocuous ingredients that could easily pass through airline security screening and be assembled quickly on board.
Yousef, whose given name is Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, and two other men were convicted in the Manila case. Yousef was also convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and is serving a life sentence in the federal Supermax prison in Colorado. Mohammed was charged in the Manila case, but he was not captured until 2003, in Pakistan. He is being held in American custody at an undisclosed location and has never been tried. He has reportedly confirmed many details of the Manila plot.
Yousef and Mohammed, both of Pakistani ancestry, grew up in Kuwait in the 1970s, where their parents had been drawn by the economic boom of the Persian Gulf oil industry. Yousef is the son of Mohammed's older sister, and they were only a few years apart in school. They each went abroad for college -- Yousef to Britain and Mohammed, along with one of Yousef's brothers, to North Carolina. They reunited after college in the late 1980s in the camps of the Arab resistance to the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Yousef had studied electrical engineering, and combined that knowledge with bomb-making expertise he acquired in the camps. He was so successful he later became an instructor in making explosives, which he sometimes referred to as "making chocolate."
