Terror overlord Osama bin Laden may have bought uranium – a key ingredient in building a nuclear bomb – while preparing his minions to attack the United States, a former follower testified yesterday.
The witness, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, said he worked for bin Laden during negotiations for the radioactive material seven years ago – but doesn’t know if the heart-stopping sale was ever finalized.
Al-Fadl recounted the details of the disturbing black-market negotiations in his second day of testimony against four men who are accused of working for bin Laden and helping blow up U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Those attacks in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people.
The men went on trial this week in Manhattan federal court under super-tight security.
Al-Fadl said a member of bin Laden’s worldwide terror group, Al Qaeda, told him to meet with a shady former official of the Sudanese government about purchasing the uranium.
When an intermediary for the seller asked him if Al Qaeda really wanted uranium, Al-Fadl told him, “Yes, they’re very serious, they want to buy it.”
At a second meeting, the man presented him with “a big bag with a cylinder this tall,” Al-Fadl said, spreading his hands about three feet apart.
The seller demanded $1.5 million for it, but Al Qaeda wanted to test it to make sure it was the deadly bomb ingredient before paying the money.
Al-Fadl testified he didn’t know if bin Laden eventually bought the uranium, but said another Al Qaeda confederate later told him he’d done a “good job” handling the early negotiations.
Al-Fadl dropped another shocker minutes later when he revealed he had told U.S. government officials two years before the suicide bomb attacks in Africa that bin Laden was plotting to “bomb embassies.”
He said he fled bin Laden’s group in 1996 after he was caught stealing $110,000 from the organization.
He went to an American embassy – prosecutors were careful not to say where – and told the first official: “I have information some people want to hurt U.S. government.”
He said he then told another official: “They try to make war against your country. They try to make something inside the United States . . . and make [a] bomb against some embassy outside.”
The devastating testimony came on the same day CIA director George Tenet said bin Laden is the greatest single threat to America.
In an annual report to Congress, Tenet said bin Laden “and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat” to the United States.
“Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated in order to defeat counterterrorism measures,” Tenet said.