Terrorism Close Calls

Three homegrown US operatives link up with Al Qaeda and hatch an audacious terror plot to wreak maximum carnage - they plan to detonate homemade bombs hidden in backpacks simultaneously on various trains in the New York City subway system.

Khalid Aldwasari, a 20-year-old Saudi national on a student visa in the United States purchases chemicals for bombs and researches targets - among them the Dallas residence of former President George W. Bush, several dams in Colorado and California. He also has plans to travel to New York and plant bombs in rental cars and blow them up at rush hour.

Once foiled the details of the plot were easy to find. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) wrote about it in their online magazine listing the cost of the items used – in all they spent a little over US$5000 in a plot to blow up UPS and FedEx cargo planes using highly sophisticated printer cartridge bombs. The devices are timed to explode in mid-air over the eastern United States.

The plot has all the makings of a Hollywood action film –Manssour Arbabsiar, an Iranian-born car salesman living in Texas plans to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. Manssour reaches out to the Mexican Cartel for help, but the cartel member he enlists is also a DEA source.

A terror cell made up of 25 predominantly British born men of Pakistani decent plot to create another 9/11. The plan is to smuggle liquid explosives inside sports drinks to be detonated simultaneously by suicide bombers on at least 7 flights headed from London’s Heathrow Airport to the US and Canada.

Kevin Harpham, a thirty-seven-year-old with strong ties to white supremacists planned to kill and maim as many people as he could during the Martin Luther King Day Parade in Spokane, Washington. Harpham carefully planted a pipe-bomb into the most crowded area of the parade route –it was intended to explode and hurl poison-laced shrapnel from fishing weights and rat poison into the crowd.