Papers: Con Was Key in Foiling JFK Plot

Jun 04, 05:00 AM

Current Headlines: By Richard Willing

A convicted drug dealer seeking a reduced sentence helped thwart an alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks and destroy New York City's Kennedy International Airport, papers filed in the case say.

The paid informant, described in a criminal complaint unsealed Saturday as "the Source," made four surveillance trips to the airport in January with Russell Defreitas, a former Kennedy Airport cargo handler who was the plot's alleged leader, the complaint says. The informant also recorded conversations, downloaded airport images from Google Earth and traveled with Defreitas, 63, to Guyana to enlist the aid of an armed radical Muslim group, Jamaat al Muslimeen, legal papers charge.

Defreitas and three other men, two Guyanese and a citizen of Trinidad, were charged with conspiring to destroy the airport by blowing up fuel lines, fuel tanks and terminal buildings. Two of the three were in custody in Trinidad, and the third still was being sought.

The case is at least the fifth time in two years in which the U.S. government has relied on paid informants, some recruited by police, to bring terrorism-related charges against U.S.-based Muslims, according to federal court records.

FBI spokesman John Miller said taking down al-Qaeda-inspired plots is getting more difficult. "When you're looking at inspired-through-the-Internet, homegrown extremists, well, they can pop up anywhere," he told ABC News on Sunday.

The informant tactic has resulted in four convictions, but raises questions about civil liberties and entrapment, says University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias, who has written on terror and the law.

Authorities first learned of the plot in January 2006, the charging papers say. The informant, who had worshiped with Defreitas at a Brooklyn mosque, contacted Defreitas in July 2006 and was gradually let in on the plot.

Defreitas, a native of Guyana and a naturalized U.S. citizen, told the informant that he had become radicalized in the early 1990s, the papers say. Working at Kennedy Airport, he said he saw missiles being shipped to Israel and decided he "wanted to do something that will get those bastards," according to a transcript quoted in the legal papers. Exploding the airport's fuel tanks, Defreitas said, "can destroy the economy of America for some time."

Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for National Security at the Justice Department, compared the plot to the arrest last month of six New Jersey-based Muslims charged in a plan to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey.

The cases, Wainstein said, highlight that the threat to the USA is no longer confined to attacks from overseas. The "terrorist threat we face" has an "evolving nature," he said. (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.