Israel Matzav

Iran behind plot to blow up JFK airport?

Michael Ledeen reports that Iran may have been behind a plot to blow up New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2007 (Hat Tip: Frum Forum). The facts are just coming out now through reporting on the trial on the local pages of the New York Times.

According to the story, one of the accused, a former official in Guyana by the name of Abdul Kadir, was wired to the government of Iran. After first denying that he had been in touch with Iranian officials in Venezuela, Kadir admitted the contacts. Indeed, he was arrested in Trinidad three years ago while en route to Iran via Caracas.

Kadir insisted, at least for a while, that his intimacy with the Islamic Republic was religious, not political. He sent several of his kids to Iran for religious study (someone with a suspicious turn of spirit might suspect they were being indoctrinated and trained to follow in their dad’s clawsteps).

That suspicious soul would find confirmation in the explosive discovery that Amir Kadir had had extensive communications with one Mohsen Rabbani, the Iranian “diplomat” indicted in connection with the terrorist attack on the Jewish Social Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the mid-1990s.

That’s quite a connection, don’t you think? If I were Mr. Sulzberger’s editor, I’d have hammered home that point: “accused terrorist in cahoots with Iranian terror master,” or some such.

Actually, the late lamented New York Sun was all over this story at the time of the initial arrests. Eli Lake, now a star at the Washington Times, said it very well back in 2007:

If Iran’s hand is found behind the JFK airport plot, it would raise an alarm about the Islamic Republic’s recent alliances with America’s hemispheric enemies. Since the 2005 ascendance of President Ahmadinejad in Iran, the Iranian regime has strengthened ties with such leaders as President Castro of Cuba, President Chavez of Venezuela, and even President Reagan’s one-time foe, President Ortega of Nicaragua.

Mr. Chavez, for example, has signed a series of cooperation agreements with Iran and allowed Iranian television producers to consult on Venezuela’s plan to offer a Spanish-language satellite television station. The Venezuelans have also allowed the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which receives funds and guidance from Tehran, to operate openly in their country.

Hmmm. Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:27 PM