Al Qaeda Moves on to Post-Afghan Terror Plan

Not content with brandishing nuclear, chemical and biological threats over the cities of the Western world, Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and his partners in the Egyptian Jihad Islami plan a series of assassinations to destabilize targeted Middle East and West European countries.
Two days before committing their September 11 terrorist outrages in the United States, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zuheiri dispatched two ace operatives posing as journalists on a suicide mission to murder Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. They wanted to be sure the Northern Alliance would fall apart before the first American soldier set foot in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda also took a hand in last month’s terror assault on the Indian parliament in New Delhi, in which 14 people died, including the five assailants.
Last Christmas Eve, a five-man Hizballah squad landed in Monte Carlo with a contract to murder Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, there on vacation. Their orders came from bin Laden’s most trusted operations officer, Imad Mughniyeh, a former Hizballah operations chief himself.
Tipped off by Israeli and French intelligence, Lahoud cut short his French Riviera holiday and flew back in haste to the presidential palace in Beirut. The London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat was the only publication to carry the story, albeit without identifying the would-be killers, drawing an angry denial from the Lebanese president.
Many top politicians have since found themselves surrounded with stepped up security: British prime minister Tony Blair and his family, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, French president Jacques Chirac and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, as well as Turkish leaders. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak barely escaped with his life from two assassination attempts by the same hands in 1993 and 1995.