| Man Told FBI of Al Qaeda Training in 2000 - Reports
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A year and a half before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a British Muslim told the FBI that he was trained to be a hijacker for Osama bin Laden and was in the United States to carry out attacks, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Niaz Khan, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, said in interviews that instead of meeting his contacts in New York, he went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, gambled away his money, then turned himself in and confessed.
Khan told NBC and The Wall Street Journal that he was lured into joining a group of Islamic radicals in Britain who offered to pay his gambling debts and was trained to hijack planes at a camp in Pakistan.
A congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks confirmed that in April 2000 an unnamed "walk-in" source told FBI agents in Newark, New Jersey, that he "was to meet five or six persons," some of them pilots, who would take over a plane and fly to Afghanistan, or blow up the plane, NBC said.
During the Wall Street Journal interview, Khan produced business cards from two FBI counterterrorism agents with whom he said he spent about two weeks in 2000, the newspaper reported.
Citing records and law-enforcement officials, the report also said Khan passed two FBI polygraph tests of his story. | |
