According to this incendiary story from yesterday's Sunday Times of London, the FBI had one of the 9/11 hijackers in custody A YEAR BEFORE THE ATTACK but refused to believe his story about flying planes into buildings. Why isn't this story being covered at all in the American press?
Sunday Times (London)
May 9, 2004, Sunday
Briton trained as 9/11 hijacker
by Christina Lamb
[excerpt (The Times doesn't post it's articles for free)]
A FORMER waiter in a Manchester curry house was recruited by Al-Qaeda and trained as a hijacker in preparation for the September 11 attacks.
The British Muslim was enlisted at a mosque in Oldham and attended terrorist training school in Pakistan. But he had second thoughts about his suicide mission as he flew to America and surrendered to the police after gambling away thousands of pounds given to him by Al-Qaeda.
The FBI's counter-terrorism taskforce questioned the 29-year-old man for three weeks at Newark, New Jersey, in the spring of 2000. There, agents refused to believe his claim that terrorists were planning to fly passenger jets into buildings, even though he passed lie detector tests....
The failure to investigate the Briton's claims was one of a startling series of missed opportunities that have emerged in inquiries by a US commission examining the September 11 attacks. His case has now been reopened amid wrangling between the FBI and British authorities.
The man, whose name is being withheld by The Sunday Times because his life is under threat from militants, was brought back to Britain in 2000 by two FBI agents and handed to British security officials at Heathrow airport.
He was then questioned by Special Branch and released. The FBI believes that the British authorities failed to follow up the case or to pass on any relevant intelligence. An urgent request to find the man after September 11 was ignored, although Special Branch officers have said they went back to him and took "appropriate action". The FBI has now asked for him to become a witness in its investigation....
He travelled to Lahore, where he was taught how to carry out a hijacking and was familiarised with the inside of a Boeing cockpit. "I knew they wanted me to do some kind of operation in which I would die, but my life was such a mess that in my mind I was already dead," he said.
