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Fourth suspect in alleged terror plot surrenders

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

(New York - WABC, June 5, 2007) (WABC) -- A fourth suspected has been arrested in connection to the alleged JFK Airport terror plot. Officials say Abdel Nur turned himself in at a police station outside the Trinidadian capital of Port-of-Spain.

Eyewitness News reporter NJ Burkett has the latest.

It happened Tuesday afternoon after a massive island-wide dragnet. The nation of Trinidad is about the size of Delaware, and authorities believed this latest arrest was only a matter of time.

His name is Abdel Nur, and he is the last of four suspects charged in the alleged plot to destroy Kennedy Airport. He joins two other suspects, Kareem Ibrahim and Abdul Kadir, in Trinidad, as well as a retired JFK cargo worker named Russell Defrietas who authorities call the suspected mastermind.

They are arrests that might never have happened without the work of an undercover informant.

"Without somebody on the inside who can take the government by the hand and lead through them through these plots, it's impossible for prosecutors to ultimately bring these cases to trial," former federal prosecutor Robert Mintz said.

Mintz says terror cells are difficult to penetrate, unlike organized crime families, where the leaders often implicate one another.

It was also an undercover informant who cracked the Fort Dix case earlier this year. And in the JFK case, prosecutors relied on a twice-convicted drug dealer awaiting sentencing. They paid him to go undercover, when he was allegedly asked, "Would you like to die as a martyr?"

"The war on terror is a whole new battleground for prosecutors, and it's going to take them years to cultivate the kind of insider information through informants that it took them to build up against the mafia kingpins," Mintz said.

Russell Defrietas will appear in court in Brooklyn Wednesday. The others are fighting extradition to the United States. Experts believe the undercover recordings in this case will be crucial.

"Prosecutors are going to want that evidence to be corroborated by other witness testimony, by tape-recorded evidence, by documents, by other things so that the jurors can be satisfied when they go to them and ask for a conviction that they don't simply have to believe an informant," Mintz said.

Mintz says it took years, decades, even, to crack the back of organized crime. The challenge in terror cases, of course, is that time is of the essence.

So just how credible was their plan?

Eyewitness News reporter NJ Burkett continues our team coverage with a look at whether the suspects could have actually pulled it off.

In a word, no. Most experts tend to agree that it probably could not have been done. But does that really matter?

Federal prosecutors say that the men were determined to blow up Kennedy Airport, attacking the pipelines that carry jet fuel from refineries in Linden, New Jersey to the airport in Queens. It was intended to be a series of coordinated explosions meant to destroy the airport in a massive chain reaction.

"It's a big 'if,'" Joe King said.

Terrorism experts like King say the plot was highly implausible. Pipelines have valves and failsafe shutdown mechanisms.

"Could you blow up the entire Kennedy Airport with that?" King asked. "No. Not gonna happen."

But King, who ran counter-terrorism in New York for the U.S. Customs Service, says intentions are far more important than capabilities.

"The intent is there," King said. "The criminal intent to try and kill hundreds or thousands of people is there."

King says that faced with an unworkable plot, the men may have attempted more realistic. The mayor praised police for targeting both terrorists and would-be terrorists.

"They go after every single potential threat," Bloomberg said. "And if it turns out to be [without substance], that's the best scenario we could possibly hope for."

"Even if they found that it couldn't work for the gas pipes, this guy was so focused for years that they would've found something else," Senator Charles Schumer said. "They would've found maybe explosives or guns or something. So getting these people was very, very important."

The basic belief from law enforcement is this: Where there is a will, a determined terrorist or even a would-be terrorist will eventually find a way.

Muslim Extremist Connections?

The suspected JFK terror plot is lifting the veil on alleged terrorists in two countries that most Americans haven't paid much attention to: Trinidad and Guyana.

Are the suspects here connected to Muslim extremists there? The Investigators Sarah Wallace has a look.

All of the alleged plotters had ties either to Guyana or Trinidad and were allegedly trying to use Muslim extremist connections to try and get support and materials for an attack at JFK.

But a top federal official acknowledges their investigation uncovered nothing more than talk, lots of meetings but nothing concrete. From an intelligence standpoint, the feds had gotten what they were going to get -- so they moved in.

One suspect, 63-year-old Russell Defreitas, is probably wishing he'd ordered the big plate special at the Lindenwood Diner Friday night. He won't see a good diner meal for a long time, if federal officials have their way.

The Guyanese born former JFK cargo worker is now accused with three others -- two Guyanese citizens and one from Trinidad -- in a terror conspiracy plot at JFK Airport. The feds say in the past year, Defreitas, a U.S. citizen, and his co-conspirators often traveled to both Guyana and Trinidad trying to tap into a network of Muslim extremists.

Security consultant Jerry Kane has done frequent business in Trinidad and is well familiar with the most notorious extremist group, Jamaat al Muslimeen, or JAM. The groups' leader Yasin Abu Bakr, led a violent coup attempt in 1990. The feds say the suspects made repeated attempts to get abu Bakr's support.

"He's well known in Trinidad and Guyana as maybe the radical Muslim in both those countries ... he's the guy," Kane said.

But there's no evidence the suspect's got any commitment from any extremist group. A federal source says when it became clear they had gathered as much intelligence as they were likely to get, and that one of the suspects, Abdul Kadir,was preparing to travel to Iran, authorities made their move.

"Were we about to have our fuel lines blown up? Probably not. But are these bad guys who would like to blow up these pipe lines? Yes they were. They should be arrested," Kane said.

Authorities are looking for a fourth suspect believed to be in Trinidad. Two others are in custody and are awaiting extradition proceedings to the U.S. Defreitas is in the federal lock up in Brooklyn.

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