Bin Laden Terror Documents Discovered
W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 15 -- As Taliban troops retreat from several strongholds in Afghanistan, conquering fighters are finding disturbing evidence of Osama bin Laden's efforts at plotting mass destruction.
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In houses in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital, Northern Alliance troops who chased out the Taliban have found terrorist training manuals, bomb-making materials and reportedly even detailed designs of nuclear weapons.
The Times of London reported today that one of its reporters discovered partially burned plans describing how to detonate plutonium and create a nuclear explosion. The documents were found in a former headquarters of al Qaeda, the bin Laden network believed to have been behind the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
According to the Times, "attempts had been made to burn the evidence, but many documents still remained. They included studies into the development of a kinetic energy supergun capable of firing chemical or nuclear warheads, external propulsion missiles, preliminary research on the creation of a thermonuclear device, as well as a multitude of instructions for making smaller bombs."
A little more than a week ago, President Bush told a group of Central and Eastern European leaders that bin Laden's attempts to get nuclear arms represented a "threat to every nation; and, eventually, to civilization itself."
Bin Laden's men made their first move in their quest for nuclear weapons in Khartoum, Sudan, in the mid-1990s. But the man allegedly sent on the mission, key bin Laden lieutenant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim (who is now being held in New York awaiting trial in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa), was apparently cheated by Russian mobsters.
Charles Adler, the American lawyer who once represented Salim, said "there was an effort to buy enriched uranium" but the Russian Mafia tried to fool Salim.
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