Osama bin Laden’s minions plotted to blow up a United Nations building in Somalia while the agency was trying to end a famine created by a civil war there, a former terrorist testified yesterday.
The witness, L’Houssaine Kherchtou, said he worked for bin Laden for years, first in Afghanistan and then in Kenya.
He testified against four alleged bin Laden underlings who are on trial in Manhattan federal court on charges they plotted to blow up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people.
Kherchtou said that while he was in Kenya in the early ’90s, he spoke to other members of the group who had just come from Somalia, where they had tried to blow up a U.N. building.
He said the men told him they had worked out a plan to “put some explosives in a car” and drive the car into the building in Mogadishu, but they were unable to pull off the attack, he said.
Federal prosecutors charge that bin Laden’s group, Al Qaeda, secretly trained and aided local Somali factions to attack American soldiers who were sent there in 1992 to restore order after a long-running civil war led to a famine.
Local armed groups killed 18 Americans in ambush attacks in Somalia – deaths now blamed indirectly on bin Laden.
Kherchtou said bin Laden’s followers in Somalia had planned other attacks against the United States and the United Nations, but fled the country in fear after an American helicopter gunship destroyed the house next to the one where the men were hiding.
The witness, who will continue testifying tomorrow, said he worked in Kenya when other members of Al Qaeda were doing “surveillance” on buildings in the capital of Nairobi.
Kherchtou said he once saw one of the men standing with a camera near the American embassy that was later hit with a massive suicide truck bomb.