US says Padilla plotted to blow up high-rises

WASHINGTON -- Suspected terrorist Jose Padilla was actively engaged in an Al Qaeda plot to simultaneously blow up multiple high-rise apartment buildings inside the United States in the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said yesterday, laying out the newly declassified information from interrogations of the American detainee and other accused terrorists.

The allegation is contained in a six-page statement that details the contacts between the terrorist network and Padilla, one of two US citizens held without charge and interrogated for two years after being designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. Until recently, neither has had access to lawyers.

Padilla, 33, who converted to Islam in the early 1990s, admitted to interrogators that he met several times with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Muhammed in the months after the American invasion of Afghanistan to discuss the apartment-building attacks, the Justice Department statement said.

Both Zubaydah and Muhammed are believed to be key organizers of the Sept. 11 attacks and are also now in US military custody. In March 2002, Muhammed allegedly hosted a dinner for Padilla on the night before he left Pakistan.

An accomplice whom the Justice Department did not identify by name told interrogators that he and Padilla planned to rent apartments in skyscrapers with natural gas pipes, then bring the high rises down by filling a room "with natural gas and then setting a detonator to go off in 24 hours."

Muhammed allegedly suggested the plot to Padilla when he came to the Al Qaeda leaders eager for a mission to set off a nuclear or radiological bomb inside the United States. Comey said both leaders were skeptical about whether Padilla's idea was "viable," and instead told him that he could kill hundreds of American civilians more easily by blowing up tall apartment buildings.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Padilla's challenge to Bush's "enemy combatants" policy by the end of the month, but Comey called the timing of the declassifications coincidental and said he assumed the court had already made its decision. The administration is not submitting the information to the court as a supplemental filing to the case of Padilla v. Rumsfeld, he said.

Instead, he said, a request from Orrin G. Hatch, the Senate Judiciary chairman and Republican of Utah, prompted the declassifications, and Comey characterized them as a plea for understanding "in the court of public opinion" of why officials decided they could not give traditional legal protections to Padilla.

"People are right to question when the president of the United States orders the military detention of an American citizen in the United States, and I very much wanted to have some of the answers for folks, and now we do," Comey said.

Andrew Patel, one of Padilla's attorneys, dismissed the allegations, saying the key issue is that Padilla still does not have the opportunity to defend himself against such charges before a neutral decision-maker.

"Essentially, what Mr. Comey has done today is give an opening statement without a trial and without a chance for Mr. Padilla to respond," he said.

But Comey said that because Padilla was an American citizen who was free to move in and out of the country, his alleged Al Qaeda training and intentions made him a threat that the ordinary criminal justice system could not handle. Finding out what he knew about Al Qaeda and stopping any planned attacks against civilians was the priority, not getting a conviction, he said.

"He would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right," Comey said. "He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week and hope -- pray, really -- that we didn't lose him."

Indeed, Comey did not rule out Padilla's prosecution, but said it would be problematic because the evidence would be inadmissible in court because no defense attorney was present during the interrogations.

Nevertheless, Padilla has attempted "to downplay or deny his commitment to Al Qaeda and the apartment building mission," the Justice Department acknowledged in a footnote.

For example, Padilla told interrogators that he never swore an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and that Padilla and his accomplice "proposed the dirty bomb plot only as a way to get out of Pakistan and avoid combat in Afghanistan, yet save face with Zubaydah." Padilla also said he later "returned to the US with no intention of carrying out the apartment building operation."

Comey, however, said Padilla admitted to interrogators that he had accepted the mission of blowing up apartment buildings, and he said the accounts from the interrogations of three other detainees -- apparently, Mohammed, Zubaydah, and the accomplice -- confirmed that the mission was real.

When he was arrested upon his arrival from the Middle East at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, Padilla was allegedly carrying $10,526 and a cellphone provided to him by Al Qaeda, along with the names, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses of several of the terrorist network's operatives.

Comey said the unidentified accomplice, who had refugee status in Great Britain and so was able to travel to the United States without a visa, is in custody. Padilla had known the accomplice in Florida in the '90s, Comey added.

The Justice Department summary alleged, however, that Padilla originally trained in the summer of 2001 with a different Al Qaeda operative, Adnan El-Shukrijumah, also known as "Jafar Al-Tayer." Both "spent time learning how to prepare and seal an apartment in order to obtain the highest explosive yield," but the partnership was abandoned because the two could not get along.

Shukrijumah, a Saudi native who lived in the United States for 15 years, is one of the seven fugitives Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III highlighted in a news conference last week when they warned that Al Qaeda may be poised for a new attack.

There are some discrepancies between the accounts by different detainees, according to the Justice Department summary. One said New York was the primary target, another said Chicago, and a third said it was to be in the Southwest.

Comey said Padilla decided to join Al Qaeda in the spring of 2000, after meeting a recruiter during a pilgrimage to Mecca. He then traveled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he filled out paperwork to enroll in an Al Qaeda training camp.