Testifying for a second day at the trial of Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, a British man who plotted to detonate a “shoe-bomb” in an airplane in the United States said he was able to smuggle explosives onto flights undetected in the Middle East and Europe.
Saajid Badat said he wore a shoe bomb on at least one flight from Pakistan to Holland and another from Holland to Great Britain in December 2001, the Associated Press reports. He said he did not detonate the bombs on those flights because he was planning an attack on American soil.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, bin Laden’s son-in-law and al-Qaeda’s spokesman after the Sept. 11, 2001, is on trial for conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to al-Qaeda.
Badat says he ultimately backed out of the shoe-bomb plot, but fellow conspirator Richard C. Reid moved forward with it, attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. Reid was arrested in 2001 in the United States, and Badat was later arrested and served prison time in Britain for the shoe-bomb plot.
Badat made his testimony by videotape because he was indicted in a U.S. court in 2004 for the shoe-bomb plot and refused come to the United States to testify. He is, however, cooperating with U.S. authorities in the trial of Abu Ghaith.
[AP]
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