US charges 4 men in plot to blow up JFK airport

WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities have charged four men with conspiring to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, foiling an alleged terrorist plot that stretched from New York to the Caribbean and South America, the Justice Department announced yesterday.

The suspects included a former cargo handler at JFK and a former member of the parliament of Guyana. The group, all Muslims, was in the early stages of the plan, which called for bombing fuel lines and tanks feeding the airport. They hoped the attack would be more devastating than the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, the criminal complaint said.

Roslynn Mauskop, the US attorney in Brooklyn, described the arrests as a major victory that broke up "one of the most chilling plots imaginable" -- one that could have caused "unthinkable" devastation had it succeeded.

But the alleged plot was never close to fruition. The FBI had been tracking the alleged plot since 2006, and a member of the group was an FBI informant. In addition, the suspects lacked both the expertise and equipment necessary to turn their aspiration into a reality, authorities said.

Still, the group had reached out to a Muslim group in Trinidad for financial and technical assistance, the complaint said. An unnamed leader of the group agreed last month to help them get in contact with militants overseas, it said.

One of the suspects was identified as Russell Defreitas, 63, a US citizen who was born in Guyana. Arrested in Brooklyn Friday night, Defreitas, a retired cargo worker, was arraigned yesterday and held over for a bail hearing on Wednesday, his attorney, Andrew Carter Jr., told Bloomberg News . Carter declined to comment further.

Defreitas formerly worked as a cargo handler at JFK and came up with the idea of blowing up airport fuel supplies after seeing missiles being shipped to Israel, where he believed they would be used to "kill Muslims," the criminal complaint said.

Two other suspects were identified as Abdul Kadir, a citizen of Guyana who until last year was a member of the parliament, and Kareem Ibrahim, a citizen of Trinidad. Both Kadir and Ibrahim were in custody in Trinidad and would probably be extradited to the United States for trial.

A fourth suspect, a Guyanese man named Abdel Nur, remained at large and was believed to be in Trinidad. If convicted, each of the four men faces up to life in prison, authorities said.

According to the criminal complaint, the alleged plot dated back to January 2006. The FBI was made aware of the plot as early as July 2006, when Defreitas recruited a man who was secretly working as an informant for the FBI.

The informant, who knew Defreitas from a Brooklyn mosque, had been convicted of drug trafficking charges in 2003 and was working with the government to get a lighter sentence, the complaint said.

Defreitas allegedly used Google Earth to obtain satellite images of the JFK airport and took his own photographs and video of the facility, identifying potential targets, escape routes, and airport security, the complaint said. He conducted several such surveillance trips with the informant, who secretly recorded their conversations.

In one taped conversation, Defreitas allegedly described JFK as an ideal target because it was not only an important economic facility, but also carried considerable symbolic weight.

"Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States," Defreitas allegedly said. "To hit John F. Kennedy, wow . . . . They love John F. Kennedy like he's the man . . . . If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice."

The complaint said Defreitas believed that well-placed bombs around fuel tanks and pipelines would destroy the entire airport and could blow up part of Queens, which the underground fuel lines run through.

The airport's main fuel supply comes from the Buckeye Pipeline, which distributes various kinds of fuel throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and parts of New York City.

A branch of the pipeline comes to JFK beneath residential neighborhoods in Queens and Staten Island. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelley said the department had kept an extra close eye on the pipeline route after learning of the plot, calling the pipe "the feeding tube that feeds international commerce."

Defreitas and the informant traveled to Guyana in February 2007 in the hope of obtaining support from other Muslims. There, Defreitas met with Kadir, a Muslim imam, or religious leader, who had been both a mayor and a member of parliament in Guyana.

Kadir agreed to help, the complaint said. He put Defreitas and the informant in contact with Nur and Ibrahim, who had contacts with Jamaat Al Muslimeen, a Muslim group in Trinidad that helped stage a coup in 1990.

In May, Defreitas and the informant traveled to Trinidad, where Nur and Kareem helped them meet with a Jamaat Al Muslimeen leader. The unnamed leader of the group listened to the idea of the JFK attack and then agreed to help them float their plan to a "contact" overseas, the complaint said.

Authorities did not make clear why they decided to arrest the men yesterday instead of waiting longer to see who else they would contact. But the Associated Press quoted Kadir's wife in Guayana as saying that her husband had been about to fly to Iran for an Islamic religious conference.

"We have no interest in blowing up anything in the US," Isha Kadir told the AP yesterday from the couple's home in Guyana. "We have relatives in the US."

According to the complaint, Kadir suggested that the group should pull off its attack in the early-morning hours in order to minimize the killing of innocent people, concentrating instead on damaging the economy.

Kennedy Airport handles more than 1,000 flights daily. Each year, 45 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of cargo, valued at $120 billion, pass through the facility, authorities said.

The arrests mark the latest in a string of high-profile plots by would-be terrorists with no direct connection to Al Qaeda, but who had become radicalized on their own.

Last month, six men were arrested on charges that they plotted to attack the US Army base at Fort Dix in New Jersey with grenades and assault rifles. The group, all suspected Islamic radicals, were not suspected of ties to foreign organizations.

And in June 2006, authorities arrested seven men in a Miami slum who were accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, although they had no access to explosives or expertise in demolition. Those suspects, too, had no ties to Al Qaeda.

"Like the Fort Dix case several weeks ago, this plot highlights the evolving nature of the terrorist threat we face," said Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department.