"A PLOT by foreign terrorists to bomb underground train and road tunnels in New York with the aim of flooding the Wall Street financial district has been thwarted, the FBI said yesterday.
The main target of the Islamic extremists, one of whom is an al-Qaeda member and under arrest in Beirut, was the Holland Tunnel, the main road link between Manhattan and New Jersey that runs under the Hudson River. It carried almost 35 million vehicles in 2005.
The alleged plot was discovered during monitoring of internet chat rooms used by extremists. It also involved bombing the New York subway.
Mark J. Mershon, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said that there were eight principal players in the plot. Three were in custody abroad and six nations had been involved in the investigation, he added."
But there's a big but:
"None of the plotters had ever been in the US or obtained materials to stage an attack.
The FBI added that the plotters had discussed driving vehicles laden with explosives into several tunnels around Manhattan and then blowing them up.
Mr Mershon said that the plot would have involved “martyrdom, explosives” in some of the tunnels that connected New Jersey and Manhattan. Earlier, FBI officials said that information gleaned from the internet suggested that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed by a US bomb last month, had agreed to back the plot financially. But there was no evidence that any money was sent or explosives bought."
So the plotters had never been to the USA; they did not have the explosives nor the funds to buy them. Did the plot amount to anything more than a bunch of Arab kids sitting around and speculating - in the way of young men everywhere - about what they would like to do to their perceived enemies?
OK, better safe than sorry - but did the FBI need to make a grand announcement about it?
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