Two U.S. law-enforcement officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a continuing investigation, said there were indications that JFK plot suspects Abdul Kadir, a former member of Parliament in Guyana, and Trinidadian citizen Kareem Ibrahim were in Trinidad to try to meet with Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), a radical group. In 1990, JAM staged a coup attempt in which the prime minister of Trinidad and other local notables were taken hostage. Abu Bakr is scheduled to go on trial in Trinidad in the near future on terrorism and sedition charges.
One of the law-enforcement officials said that three out of four suspects charged in the JFK plot—Kadir, Ibrahim and Abdul Nur, a Guyanese citizen who currently is the target of an international manhunt—were acquaintances of Abu Bakr. Late last month, according to a complaint for arrest made public by the Justice Department over the weekend, two suspects in the JFK plot—Kadir and Russell Defreitas, a former JFK airport employee and U.S. citizen whose arrest over the weekend triggered a media feeding frenzy about the alleged plot—traveled with an undercover FBI informant to Trinidad. (The four suspects have not yet been indicted, and therefore have yet to enter a plea). While there, the complaint says, they visited with Nur at “one of the compounds of the JAM leader.” The leader is not named in the U.S. government complaint, but was identified by law-enforcement officials as Abu Bakr.
During a conversation recorded at the behest of U.S. investigators, Nur told Defreitas and the undercover informant that he (Nur) had met with the JAM leader about the suspects’ alleged scheme to blow up a pipeline carrying fuel from New Jersey via Staten Island to JFK Airport in Queens, according to the government complaint. The complaint says that during the secretly recorded conversation, Nur said the JAM leader asked the suspects to come back a few days later to discuss their plan in detail. According to the complaint, the JAM leader also indicated to Nur that he wanted to check out Defreitas and the undercover source before any further meetings. It is unclear whether any further meetings with the JAM leader occurred, however.
U.S. law-enforcement officials said that while they believe that suspects Nur, Kadir and Ibrahim all had in the past met with Abu Bakr, at this point they have no evidence that Abu Bakr actually agreed at any point to offer his or the JAM’s backing, either moral or material, for the JFK pipeline plot.
A U.S. counterterrorism official said that some intelligence available to U.S. agencies suggests JAM has had sporadic contact with international Islamic terror groups—such as Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and the Lebanese-based, Iranian-supported Shia movement, Hizbullah. However, according to the official, there is little indication that JAM has ever established an “operational” relationship with any international terror organization.
JAM became infamous in 1990 for a coup attempt in which Abu Bakr, with more than 100 followers, stormed the Trinidad and Tobago Parliament building and took the prime minister and much of his cabinet hostage. The resulting standoff sparked a wave of rioting in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad’s capital, that left many dead and extensive property damage.
But Abu Bakr and other hostage takers avoided imprisonment when he and his group were granted amnesty following negotiations that ended the hostage incident, according to a monograph about the group published by the Jamestown Foundation, an antiterrorism think tank based in Washington, D.C. The foundation, and news reports from Trinidad, say that the current terrorism and sedition charges against Abu Bakr relate to a series of bombings in Trinidad two years ago, as well as his role in allegedly ordering the murders of former JAM members who defected from the group. A spokeswoman for the office of Trinidad’s attorney general had no immediate comment.
U.S. counterterrorism officials say that today they regard Abu Bakr, a 64-year-old former Trinidadian police officer who converted to Islam, and his JAM movement as more of a street gang engaged in organized crime activities like drug trafficking and protection rackets than an international terrorist threat. But the gang’s history of violence, apparent access to cash and weaponry and periodic indulgence in militant Islamic rhetoric created concern that the accused JFK plotters were trying to hook up with an organization with genuine potential to cause mayhem.
At one point a few days before the Feds and Trinidadian authorities swooped in to break up the alleged JFK plot, the U.S. government complaint says Kareem suggested that the plotters should abandon their effort to present the plan for approval to JAM and Abu Bakr. Instead, Kareem said he would seek support for the plan from contacts he had overseas who might be interested in financing it, the complaint said. A U.S. official said that Kareem talked about having such contacts in Britain or Iran. A report by McClatchy newspapers quoted Trinidad’s attorney general saying that the reason that authorities moved when they did to arrest the suspects was that Kadir was about to travel from Trinidad via Venezuela to Iran to attend an Islamic conference. For the moment, however, U.S. officials are downplaying any Iranian link to the plotters, saying they have no further indication that it might be significant.
U.S. officials also say that while the alleged JFK plot was grandiose in its ambitions, there is little reason to believe the accused plotters had the technical know-how or competence to actually carry it out. The Feds say that what the plotters wanted to do was to blow up the entire pipeline from New Jersey to JFK Airport, thereby not only causing massive destruction at the airport itself but also in the neighborhoods through which the pipeline passed. But due to pipeline safety mechanisms and the difficulty of igniting jet fuel, government officials said, it is unlikely this particular group of suspects, based on their apparent level of knowledge, would have been able to cause the huge conflagration the government alleges they hoped to produce.
