LONDON — A former British airline ticket agent who plotted to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. targets once urged Muslims living in the West to carry out attacks on the economies of "all interfering nations," prosecutors said Monday.
Dhiren Barot, a 34-year-old Muslim convert who faces sentencing after pleading guilty last month to one count of murder conspiracy, had called for "destabilizing" attacks on Western targets and said they could best be carried out by Muslim residents, prosecutor Edmund Lawson told a court here.
"The indigenous believers that reside in these meddling countries, however, can only do this. For it is they, the locals, and not the foreigners, who understand the culture, area and common practices of the enemy whom they coexist amongst," Barot wrote in his book "The Army of Madinah in Kashmir," published under the pseudonym Esa al-Hindi in 1999. A prosecutor read the passage in court.
Monday's hearing provided the first detailed look at a plot that authorities said was aimed at drafting British Muslims to organize terrorist attacks on financial targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The plotters also hoped to explode gas-cylinder-laden limousines in underground parking garages in Britain.
The prosecution's case revealed a group that was scrupulous in its research and wide-ranging in its malignant curiosity.
The militants pondered the effects of various kinds of poisons, how to explode a radioactive dirty bomb without killing the attacker before he could deliver the charge, where a bridge needed to be hit to bring it down, and whether it would be possible to blow up a subway under the Thames River.
"Imagine the chaos that would be caused if a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself," Barot wrote in one of the records seized after his arrest. "This would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning, etc., that would occur."
Barot sought to emulate what he saw as "the definitive accident," the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and envisioned what he described as a coordinated series of attacks "forming another memorable black day for the enemies of Islam."
Seven codefendants who face trial in April were allegedly working under Barot's leadership in a plot that Lawson said was "designed to strike at the very heart of both America and this country, and to cause the loss of human life on a massive scale."
