Briton Awaits Sentence Over U.S. Bomb Plot

One of the top al Qaeda operatives known to have been captured in Britain appeared in court amid heavy security on Monday for sentencing in a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington and other major U.S. financial targets.

Dhiren Barot, 34, started plotting in 2000 what he said would be a "memorable black day for the enemies of Islam," prosecutor Edmund Lawson said at the start of what is expected to be a two-day sentencing hearing.

Flanked by two court guards, Barot sat expressionless behind a glass wall, as the proceedings began. Born in India but reared in Britain, he pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to commit mass murder in terrorist plots on both sides of the Atlantic. He faces a life sentence.

The criminal plot was to carry out massive explosions in Britain and in the United States, Lawson said, and was meant to kill "hundreds if not thousands of innocent people without warning."

Prosecutors say Barot had planned to cram three limousines with gas cylinders and explosives and detonate them in underground London parking garages and had also identified several London hotels and railway stations as potential targets. Other attacks in Britain included using a dirty bomb and blowing up a petrol tanker, according to Lawson.

In computer files recovered by police, Lawson said Barot planned to bomb a subway train as it traveled through a tunnel under the Thames River.

"If a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself, this would cause pandemonium ... explosions, flooding, drowning," Barot wrote in the computer documents found, according to Lawson.

Barot was born a Hindu in India but was brought to Britain as a toddler. He converted to Islam when he was about 20, Lawson said.

After leaving his job as an airline ticket clerk in Britain, he went to Pakistan and attended a terrorist training camp in the Pakistan-controlled area of Kashmir for at least four months, Lawson said.

Investigators confiscated Barot's notes that showed he gained extensive training in the use of weapons, chemicals and bomb design. In 1998, he traveled to Malaysia and the Philippines in 1999, where he attended the Jamaah al-Islamiya terror training camp, Lawson said.

In August 2000 and March 2001, Barot went on two reconnaissance trips to the United States, Lawson said.

Plans outlining details of the U.S. attacks, including reconnaissance videos filmed in August 2001, were found on a computer after Barot's arrest in August 2004, prosecutors said.

Discovery of his purported plot against U.S. targets that included World Bank headquarters in Washington, the Citigroup building in New York and the Prudential building in Newark, N.J., led President Bush to raise the U.S. terrorism threat level.

Barot is wanted in the United States on a four-count indictment and faces a life sentence if convicted of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Under British law, domestic proceedings take precedence over an extradition. He is also wanted in Yemen for the 1988 kidnappings of Westerners.

Friends said he had aspired to be a hotel manager. He is also known Abu Eisa al-Hindi, Abu Musa al-Hindi and Issa al-Britani.

That last name figured in the report of the U.S. commission into the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which claimed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 planner, ordered al-Britani to identify bombing targets in New York and sent him to Malaysia to study Islamic extremists there.

The Associated Press, The British Broadcasting Corp., and Times Newspapers Ltd. successfully challenged a court ruling that threatened to prevent news media reporting details of sentencing and details that emerged in the hearing. Judge Neil Butterfield had ruled that publishing details of the sentencing hearing could prejudice trials of Barot's seven co-defendants.

The alleged co-conspirators are scheduled to face trial in Britain next year.