Pipeline case broken by insider
NEW YORK – The question was simple: “Would you like to die as a martyr?” The informant unhesitatingly replied yes – there was no greater way to die in Islam.
The right answer put him in the midst of a suspected terrorist plot conceived as more devastating than the 9/11 attacks. He was soon making surveillance trips around John F. Kennedy International Airport – the “chicken farm,” as the planners dubbed their target – and visiting the Trinidad compound of a radical Muslim group.
The insider, a twice-convicted drug dealer who agreed to help in exchange for a lighter sentence, was a government informant whose surreptitious work undermined a plot to destroy the Queens airport by exploding a jet fuel pipeline.
His help once again demonstrated the growing importance of informants in the war on terrorism, particularly as smaller radical groups become more aggressive.
“In most cases, you can’t get from A to B without an informant,” said Tom Corrigan, a former member of the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force. “Most times when an informant tells you what is going on, speculation becomes reality.”
According to court papers and investigators, the informant began working for the government in 2004, after his second drug-trafficking conviction in New York, and he quickly proved to be a credible source.
He was sent to meet with the JFK plot’s alleged mastermind, Russell Defreitas, in 2006 and was introduced by an unnamed third party. Defreitas accepted the informant as legitimate, saying he was sure they knew each other through a Brooklyn mosque.
Defreitas, according to federal papers, believed the informant “had been sent by Allah to be the one” to pull off the bombing.
Four Muslim men are accused of plotting to use explosives to destroy a jet fuel pipeline that runs through populous residential neighborhoods to the airport, which they allegedly believed would kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe.
In an indictment, one of them is quoted as saying the bombing would “cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Although the plotters put in a great deal of time and travel, they never managed to obtain any explosives before authorities arrested Defreitas and foiled the JFK scheme. Experts said the plot could have resulted in damage and fires, but nothing on the scale that the defendants had envisioned.
The men accused in the JFK plot didn’t turn to Middle Eastern extremists for support to target the airport. Instead, investigators say the informant and defendants Kareem Ibrahim and Defreitas visited a compound belonging to the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a radical Muslim group based in Trinidad off Venezuela’s coast.
The complaint also made clear how deeply the informant had infiltrated the small band of would-be terrorists. While Defreitas, a retired JFK airport cargo worker, made four reconnaissance missions to the airport with the informant, federal authorities recorded each one on audio and video.
Defreitas, 63, who immigrated to the U.S. more than 30 years ago from Guyana, was in custody Sunday pending a bail hearing, was arrested two days earlier in Brooklyn.
Ibrahim and another suspect, Abdul Kadir, were in custody in Trinidad awaiting extradition hearings. Officials identified Kadir as a former mayor of a Guyanese town and a member of the country’s Parliament.
Authorities in Trinidad were still seeking a fourth suspect, Abdel Nur.