It was a big score, but they were hoping to snag even bigger quarry.
From FoxNews, with thanks to all who sent this in:
NEW YORK “” Al Qaeda’s reported nuclear whiz kid “” a “tantalizing terror figure” with a $5 million bounty on his head “” was the figure investigators had hoped to snag in their 18-month probe of a plot to blow up a New York airport, the New York Post reported Monday.
The name of Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, reportedly the man Usama bin Laden tapped to lead a previous plot to detonate nuclear bombs simultaneously in several U.S. cities, came up at several points in taped conversations during the probe, law-enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told the paper.
Three Muslim men were nabbed Friday in the alleged plan to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport, which involved exploding a jet-fuel pipeline that snakes from New York to New Jersey. A fourth suspect is at large.
Given Shukrijumah’s notoriety in the terror world and the fact that he grew up in Guyana, as did three of the suspects, investigators immediately homed in on him, the Post reported.
“We thought he could be the invisible hand. He’s always in the shadows, particularly in [the Caribbean]. He’s passed through it, he’s known, his name came up in the conversations,” one law-enforcement official told the Post. “He would have been the prize.”