Plan to attack New York tunnels: Yet another dubious “terror plot” (tags)
New Yorkers awoke Friday morning to lurid headlines in the New York Daily News proclaiming that a “Tunnel Bomb Plot” had been foiled. That afternoon, Federal Bureau of Investigation Assistant Director Mark Mershon, flanked by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, told a press conference that the FBI had disrupted a plan to carry out suicide bombings in the PATH train tunnels that carry hundreds of thousands of commuters between Manhattan and New Jersey. The alleged mastermind, a 31-year-old resident of Beirut, Lebanon named Assem Hammoud, was being held in Beirut and had, according to the FBI, confessed to participating in the plot and acting on the orders of Osama bin Laden. There were a total of eight suspects, two of whom were in custody at unnamed locations. None were Americans and none had set foot on US soil.