LONDON -- Documents recovered from a remote area along the Pakistan border have revealed that Osama bin Laden wants al-Qaida to launch a "global fireball" by lighting forest fires in Europe, the United States, Australia and South America, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. The documents were uncovered during an operation led by the British intelligence service MI6, and now have been described by experts in that agency as "the most worrying [plot] that the world is facing."
The catastrophic wildfires would not only produce an environmental disaster but would stretch emergency services often beyond their limit and leave insurance companies facing multi-billion claims for damages that could effectively destroy the already shattered economies of a number of countries.
Australia, gripped by years of drought that has left tinderbox conditions as summer now approaches, regards the threat as "terrifying."
The country's attorney-general, Robert McClelland, warned there is "a most urgent need for renewed vigilance against a very real and present danger."
The FBI has issued a high priority warning that "such a terrorist plan could devastate states like California."
Spain, France and Germany -- all with vast forests -- are "vulnerable," MI6 warned the intelligence services of those countries. "The Amazon Basin, and other forests which supply the world with wood, is another prime target," the warning added.
The instructions for a "global fireball" were among documents recovered in the Pakistan border raid on an al-Qaida safe house.
The author was Abu Musab al-Suri, who wrote the terrorist textbook, "The Global Islamic Resistance Call."
The 50-year-old Syrian-born terrorist was seized by U.S. Special Forces in Quetta, Pakistan, in 2005.
There are reports that he was flown to Egypt for interrogation by CIA officers and remains in one of Egypt's secret prisons.
But other reports suggest that, in a deal with Syria, al-Suri has been released and is now in Baghdad planning attacks against Israel.
