by Bob Drogin, Eric Lichtblau and Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - U.S. authorities overseas have interrogated a second suspect in the alleged al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in America, officials said yesterday, as investigators scrambled to determine if other accomplices are in the United States, Switzerland, Egypt or elsewhere.
U.S. officials also said the so-called dirty-bomb plan apparently called for stealing radioactive material from an unidentified American university laboratory. Low-level nuclear isotopes are widely used in medicine, research and other fields.
The plot, which was still in its early stages, was foiled when CIA, FBI, Customs and State Department agents successfully identified and tracked José Padilla - a Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Muslim convert who adopted the name Abdullah al Muhajir - in Cairo, Egypt, and Zurich, Switzerland. He was arrested May 8 when he flew from Switzerland to Chicago on what officials called a scouting mission for a terrorist attack.
President Bush said Padilla was one of many “would-be killers” that the U.S. has captured and that it is looking for many more.
“This guy Padilla’s a bad guy, and he is where he needs to be: detained,” the president said.
Officials said Padilla has refused to cooperate since his arrest. He is being held at a high-security Navy brig outside Charleston, S.C.
Yesterday, Padilla’s lawyer said at a federal-court hearing in New York that Padilla’s continued detention was a violation of the Constitution because he had not been charged and was being denied access to legal counsel.
“My client is a citizen,” attorney Donna Newman told reporters. “He still has constitutional rights.”
Typically, if the government arrests someone, it must bring criminal charges against him and give him a lawyer and a public trial. But wartime is different. Captured soldiers can be held until the war ends. There are no charges or trials required.
Bush administration lawyers want to import the law of war into the homeland fight against terrorism. And they want to hold Padilla indefinitely as an “enemy belligerent,” not as a criminal suspect.
Under this theory, the government need not charge Padilla with a crime or convict him in a trial. Its prosecutors need only convince a judge that Padilla had been acting as an enemy soldier.
More Questions than Answers
Members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee were given a classified briefing on the case yesterday as part of their wide-ranging review of Sept. 11 intelligence failures. But some members came away with more questions than answers, a congressional source said.
“The concern we’d like to pursue is, what’s the substance of this? Not many people were satisfied that we had a whole hell of a lot” on Padilla in terms of hard evidence, the source said. “We’re all for sticking bad guys in the hole, but you’ve got to have evidence.”
A senior U.S. intelligence official said Pakistan detained a second suspect in the plot last month. The official said the man, who has not been publicly identified but is from an Arab country in the Middle East, is being interrogated by U.S. authorities at an undisclosed location. There were conflicting reports as to whether Pakistan had handed him over to U.S. authorities.
The second suspect traveled with Padilla to eastern Afghanistan last fall to meet Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaida’s alleged operations chief, and later accompanied Padilla to secret meetings with other senior al-Qaida leaders inside Pakistan to discuss the dirty-bomb proposal as well as potential attacks against hotels, gas stations and other targets, the official said.
Padilla got a U.S. passport in March, but the local consular official in Pakistan was concerned that Padilla might be involved in identity theft, prompting a look into his background.
The discovery that Padilla had a long criminal record in Florida and Illinois led to questions about why he was in Pakistan. The information was forwarded to joint terrorism task forces, led by the FBI, in Miami and Chicago.
The investigation picked up steam after FBI and CIA agents, working with Pakistani authorities, captured Zubaydah, the alleged operations chief for al-Qaida, in a raid in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad on March 28.
During an interrogation in late April, Zubaydah told U.S. authorities that he was approached late last year by an American and another man who proposed building a dirty bomb for use in the United States, according to intelligence officials.
“He didn’t identify him or give a name, just a generic description of him,” one official said. “It was fairly sketchy information.”
After interrogating al-Qaida prisoners detained at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and checking immigration and other documents, the CIA and other agencies quickly identified Padilla and the second suspect.
Agents then took passport photos of the two men back to Zubaydah for confirmation. “He was surprised, but he said, ‘Yes, that’s them,’ ” an intelligence official said.
By then authorities had lost track of Padilla, but U.S. intelligence caught up with him in Egypt.
“After that he was under constant surveillance,” one intelligence official said.
FBI and other agents trailed him in Cairo and then to Zurich, where they made sure Swiss authorities closely checked his baggage and shoes — in case he sought to emulate shoe-bomb suspect Richard Reid — before he boarded a Swiss Air flight from Zurich to Chicago on May 8.
About six FBI agents and an equal number of Swiss law-enforcement officers secretly watched Padilla on the flight home, monitoring his every move, until he was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
Troubles with the Law
Padilla’s life remains a focus of intense scrutiny.
Now 31, Padilla moved to Chicago with his family when he was 4. His first arrest, for the stabbing death of a local man, came when he was 14. At least four other arrests and two convictions for armed robbery and battery followed. He worked at restaurants and hotels when he wasn’t in jail.
In 1991, he jumped bail on a weapons charge and moved to South Florida.
He soon found himself in trouble again, charged with aggravated assault and carrying a concealed weapon. It was after serving 10 months in the Broward County jail that Padilla, raised a Roman Catholic, converted to radical Islam along with his future wife, Cherie Maria Stultz.
They both worked at a Taco Bell restaurant in Davie, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, close to about 20 Islamic centers or mosques. Padilla disappeared after two years, and the couple later divorced.
U.S. officials say Padilla had moved to Egypt by 1998. His goal, they said, was to further explore Muslim teachings and traditions. He stayed about two years, eventually taking up with illegal underground mosques that preach extremist forms of Islam, officials said.