Al Qaeda’s Dirty Bomb Agent Resurfaces
The newly-surfaced Adman Shukrijumah was first exposed in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 132 on Nov. 7, 2003 as Osama bin Laden’s agent for procuring radioactive material to be used in a dirty bomb in the United States.
The article was entitled: One-Man “Dirty Bomb” Cell Sought in US and Canada.
Three years on, on Sept. 3, 2006, the FBI described the same Shukrijumah to the Los Angeles Times as “one of al Qaeda’s most well-trained, intelligent and deadly operatives, the ultimate ‘sleeper agent’ intent on attacking the US, possibly with weapons of mass destruction.”
On September 11, al Arabiya television quoted Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who has interviewed bin Laden many times, as warning that the al Qaeda leader is preparing new attacks in the United States more devastating than those that destroyed the World Center and damaged the Pentagon exactly five years ago.
Mir said his sources indicated that bin Laden had assigned Adnan Shukrijumah with executing the operations after smuggling explosives and nuclear materials across the Mexico-US border.
Raised in Saudi Arabia, Shukrijumah lived in New York where he made contact with al Qaeda operatives at the al Farouq mosque. In 2000, he visited a number of Arab countries before moving on to Pakistan and Afghanistan. In late 2004, US officials confirmed the DEBKA-Net-Weekly report of Nov 7, 2003 that Shukrijumah had attempted to obtained radioactive material for use in a dirty bomb.
The original DEBKA-Net-Weekly revelation placed the 27-year old Shukrijumah in 2003 at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor for research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, employed in the guise of a nuclear engineering student.
Al Qaeda operative Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, after his capture in Karachi in March 2003, gave away the existence of a “one-man cell” who he described as trained to build radiological bombs capable of environmental contamination from scratch.
The one-man cell was called Adnan Shukrijumah.
His mission at McMaster University’s atomic reactor laboratories was to steal radioactive materials for building dirty bombs.
Why is this “nuclear engineer” suddenly of such interest to the US authorities?
In the last two years, Shukrijumah has been seen in several countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, although never for long. He appears to flit easily from place to place before he can be pinned down. Suspicions have arisen that one of those flits may have carried him across the border and back into the United States, possibly via Mexico, to carry out the plan al Qaeda plotted as the follow-up to the 9/11 attacks.
The lack of security coordination makes border traffic difficult to monitor.
A small group of Arabs was arrested on the Mexico-US border last year but a large influx of men of Middle Eastern appearance is known to have been using the many gaps to enter the United States. In these circumstances, al Qaeda operatives can infiltrate any American city undetected with the help of Hispanic crime syndicates.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror sources conclude that –
1. By moving constantly across vast distances and numerous countries, Shukrijumah has stymied all attempts to execute the American and Canadian warrants for his arrest.
2. To be safe, it must be assumed that he retains access to materials for radioactive bombs or other weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical.
3. Given al Qaeda’s predilection for long-term planning, Shukrijumah is rightly considered as dangerous today as he was in 2003 when DEBKA-Net-Weekly first discovered him.
