NY Post Links JFK Terror Plot to Al Qaeda

Hmmm...will The New York Times put this story somewhere below the fold on page 57 tomorrow?

Al Qaeda's so-called nuclear whiz kid - a "tantalizing terror figure" with a $5 million bounty on his head - was the radical big shot investigators had hoped to snag in their 18-month JFK-plot probe, The Post has learned.

The name of "invisible hand" Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, reportedly the man Osama bin Laden tapped to lead a previous scheme to detonate nuclear bombs simultaneously in several U.S. cities, came up at several points in taped conversations during the probe, according to law-enforcement sources familiar with the investigation.

Three Muslim men were nabbed Friday in the alleged plan to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport - the "chicken farm," as they dubbed it - which involved exploding a jet-fuel pipeline. A fourth suspect is at large.

Given Shukrijumah's notoriety in the terror world and the fact that he grew up in Guyana, as did three of the suspects, probers immediately homed in on him.

"Eyebrows went up," said one law-enforcement source.

"We thought he could be the invisible hand. He's always in the shadows, particularly in [the Caribbean]. He's passed through it, he's known, his name came up in the conversations.

"He would have been the prize."

So the feds allowed the probe to continue until the last moment, which came when one of the suspects boarded a plane in Trinidad headed for Venezuela - where the United States has no extradition agreement. Authorities weren't willing to risk losing him, so they "pulled the trigger" on the arrests, one source said.

Investigators had yet to collect evidence linking Shukrijumah to the JFK plot, but it's clear his name and efforts were well-known to the suspects.

Shukrijumah grew up in Guyana, according to terror expert and author Paul L. Williams. Shukrijumah's late father, Gulshair, an Islamic scholar, once served as a temporary imam at Brooklyn's al-Farouq mosque, which is well-known in radical circles, Williams said.

The mosque has connections to a scheme to fund an al Qaeda-linked sheik as well as one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

But the mosque's imam, Hile Said, 31, said, "We are against terrorism. We are callers of peace."