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| Southeast Asia | |
| Malaysian among militants involved in 2002 West Coast terror plot | |
| 2006-02-10 | |
| KUALA LUMPUR - A Malaysian recruited by Al Qaeda to become a pilot for a second wave of Sept. 11-style attacks on the United States pulled out of the plan after he witnessed the carnage of the first assaults, Southeast Asian officials said on Friday. US President George W. Bush in a speech Thursday outlined some of the details of an alleged plot to hijack an airliner and fly it into a skyscraper in Los Angeles, and said cooperation between Washington and several Asian countries helped expose it. The plan never appeared close to the stage where it could be put into execution. And scores of arrests in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks severely curtailed the ability of Al Qaeda and it’s Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemmah Islamiyah, to operate. Adding details to Bush’s outline, security officials and terrorism experts in Southeast Asia on Friday said Malaysian engineer Zaini Zakaria was among three men Al Qaeda was preparing to take part in an attack on the US West coast. Zaini traveled to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1999, where he met senior figures in the terrorist group including Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, a Malaysian security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. When he returned to Malaysia the same year, Zaini obtained a license to fly a small plane, and began making enquiries in Australia about getting a license to fly a jet, the official said. But Zaini was never told what his mission for Al Qaeda would be. When he saw media coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, he severed his ties with the militants. Zaini, who has been detained without trial in Malaysia since December 2002, told Malaysian interrogators that he “didn’t want that kind of Jihad,” another Malaysian official told AP.
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