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Buried inside a Bruce Willis video, the evidence of a plot to kill thousands

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: He scripted his meticulously researched ideas for mass murder and then presented them to the Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan for approval. Yesterday, Dhiren Barot’s proposals were revealed in detail for the first time, when a court was told they would have killed “hundreds if not thousands of people without warning” in the UK and US, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

There was to be an explosion on a tube train under the Thames and bombs in limousines in underground car parks. A gas attack on the Heathrow Express and a radioactive dirty bomb to cause pandemonium were other chilling schemes, the court heard. In the US he had equally deadly plans for destruction and he filmed major financial buildings, including the World Trade Centre, during reconnaissance missions before the 9/11 attacks, the report said.

Barot, 34, had wanted to create “another memorable black day for the enemies of Islam”, Woolwich crown court was told. He aspired to emulate the “respectable project that took place in Madrid” (the Madrid train bombings) and was the ringleader of the plot, said Edmund Lawson QC, for the crown.

Radicalisation: The court heard details of Barot’s life before the police began to monitor him. Born in India, he moved to Kingsbury, north London, as a baby in 1972 and attended a local school before leaving in 1988 after taking his GCSEs. He got a job as an airline ticket clerk in Piccadilly in 1991, but left on an overseas trip in 1995, which turned out to be to a terrorist training camp in Kashmir. The court was told that by then he had converted to Islam and was growing more radical, the newspaper reported.

In Pakistan, he was instructed in the use of weapons and explosives and the court was shown his “student notebooks” from this time, with his handwritten notes and diagrams on subjects such as Kalashnikovs and the manufacture of poisons and bomb-making. In 1999 Barot travelled to the Philippines, where he attended another terrorist camp and underwent further training in small arms, mortars, explosives handling, navigation and jungle patrolling. When he was arrested in August 2004, he had been working on his plans for at least 4½ years, Mr Lawson told the court. At the heart of the plan was the “gas limos project” in which three stretch limos would be packed with explosives, left in underground car parks and detonated in a series of synchronised blasts.

Barot’s own words, in a signed document found in Pakistan, which prosecutors say was presented to senior Al Qaeda figures there in early 2004, bear testimony to his ruthless dedication, the report says. “This project forms the main cornerstone (main target) of a series of planned attacks that have been prepared for synchronised execution on the same day at the same time,” he wrote.

Of the scheme to blow up a tube train under the Thames, he wrote: “Imagine the chaos that would be caused if a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself. This would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning etc, that would occur/result.”

Surveillance: Footage from his reconnaissance in New York was discovered concealed within a video of Bruce Willis’ movie Die Hard with a vengeance which is about terrorist attacks on New York. Police found the videotape in a London garage. “The plans involved the giving of no warnings and were designed to kill as many innocent civilians as possible,” said Mr Lawson. These schemes were initiated before 9/11 and then shelved after those attacks, but had been worked on again as late as February 2004, he added.

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