Osama bin Laden’s plot to buy tons of cocaine, poison it and then sell it to Americans was revealed to the Drug Enforcement Administration by an informant linked to a Colombian coke cartel, a senior law-enforcement source said yesterday.
The informant’s stunning disclosure, made to the DEA within the past year, is detailed in an intelligence summary by another law enforcement agency that was alerted to the fiendish plot.
The Post broke the news about bin Laden’s plot and the document – which a Post reporter has seen – yesterday. Also yesterday, a law-enforcement source familiar with the case said that a teletype detailing the informant’s claims had been sent previously from the DEA’s New York office to Washington.
But the DEA yesterday said: “No DEA official in Washington, Afghanistan, Bogota or New York has any information of this type of plot by bin Laden, and a computerized search of our databases reveals no such reporting.”
The DEA released the statement before speaking with a reporter from The Post, saying the newspaper had refused to inform the agency “of the basis of its allegations.”
A Post reporter later spoke with the DEA spokesman and told him the story was based on another agency’s document, and that The Post does not have a copy of it.
Sources told The Post the DEA’s informant told the agency that in 2002, a year after the 9/11 terror attacks that bin Laden masterminded, he personally met with members of a Colombian drug cartel to negotiate tens of millions of dollars in coke purchases. Bin Laden’s plan was to lace the drugs with a poison.