Saajid Muhammad Badat, convicted in the U.K. in 2005 of plotting to explode an airplane, testified that Osama Bin Laden told him his mission would help bring down the U.S. economy. “He said the American economy is like a chain and if you break one link” you can destroy the whole economy, Badat said the now-deceased leader of the terrorist group al-Qaeda told him in a one-on-one meeting in Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Badat testified today at the trial of a New York man, Adis Medunjanin, accused of plotting to blow up New York’s subways in 2009 on behalf of al-Qaeda.
Jurors are listening to Badat’s taped testimony in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Badat, 33, is the first terrorist convicted in the U.K. to present evidence in a U.S. trial, the Crown Prosecution Service said in an April 16 statement.
Medunjanin, 28, Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay were recruited by al-Qaeda to bomb subway lines in Manhattan around the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to the indictment. The plot was stopped within days of its happening in 2009, prosecutors said. Zazi, 26, and Ahmedzay, 27, who pleaded guilty in 2010, are cooperating with the government and testified at the trial.
Military Training
In August 2008, the three men went to join the Taliban in Pakistan where they were recruited by al-Qaeda, which gave them military training and encouraged them to conduct suicide attacks in the U.S., Ahmedzay and Zazi said. The plan was for an attack during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The three men lived in the New York borough of Queens and went to Flushing High School.
Badat pleaded guilty to plotting to bring a shoe bomb on an airplane and was sentenced to 13 years, later lowered to 11 because of his cooperation. He abandoned the al-Qaeda plot. His co-conspirator was Richard Reid, who was flying to Miami from Paris in December 2001 when he was found trying to light his shoe. Reid pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence in the U.S.
