OSAMA BIN LADEN, the Al-Qaeda leader, ordered a devastating attack on Heathrow to punish Tony Blair, calling the prime minister his “principal enemy”, a senior lieutenant has revealed.

He told his operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to prepare the strike on the airport at a meeting in Kabul soon after the attacks on America in September 2001.

The Sunday Times has seen transcripts of Mohammed’s long-running interrogation. These records relate to a period of four months after his capture in Pakistan just over a year ago and indicate that Al-Qaeda terrorists were sent from Pakistan and Afghanistan to work on “the Heathrow operation”.

The transcripts also show Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 onslaught that killed 2,818 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, originally planned to hijack 10 planes and crash them into targets on the east and west
coasts of America. Each interrogation is prefaced with a warning: “The detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.”

But the statements have been cross-checked with the confessions of other senior Al-Qaeda prisoners. This has enabled investigators to build an authentic picture of the organisation.

The claims about Heathrow by the most senior Al-Qaeda member in captivity lend weight to this month’s warning by Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, that an attack on London is “inevitable”. Stevens says the Madrid bombings of March 11 should be a “wake-up call” to Britain and the European Union.

Like Spain, Britain has been picked by Bin Laden as a target. The government has said on several occasions that it has received warnings about Heathrow. But Mohammed's account is the first confirmation of an authorised plan of attack.

He told interrogators that Al-Qaeda's men were given money and told to begin surveillance of the airport, assessing its weak points and finding locations from which planes might be shot down.

In February 2003 — more than a year after this directive and several weeks before Mohammed's arrest — tanks and 400 troops surrounded the airport. Blair was accused of staging a stunt to boost support for the imminent invasion of Iraq, but insists that he had received intelligence indicating a possible attack.

"To this day we don't know if it was correct and we foiled it or if it was wrong," he said in a speech in his constituency.
Mohammed claims that the Heathrow operation never advanced beyond surveillance, blaming difficulties in communicating with operatives after the Americans began to bomb Afghanistan and the Taliban government was overthrown.

Describing September 11 2001 as "far more successful than we had ever imagined", Mohammed said he and his colleagues were taken aback by the strength of world reaction. "Afterwards we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run."

Key people could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on a laborious courier system. "Before September 11 we could dispatch operatives with the expectation of follow-up contact, but after October 7 [when the bombing started] that changed 180 degrees. There was no longer a war room and operatives had more autonomy."

Mohammed said 9/11 had originally been conceived as a two-pronged attack on five targets on the east coast of America and five on the west coast. Planners had considered targeting bridges, nuclear plants, landmark buildings such as Library Tower in Los Angeles and Sears Tower in Chicago and Hollywood studios.

"We had talked about hitting California as it was America's richest state and Bin Laden had talked about economic targets," he said. However, Bin Laden decided a two-pronged attack would be impossible to synchronise and ordered an onslaught in two stages instead.

Realising that "after 9/11 Arabs would be scrutinised", the plotters had recruited a second group of four pilots with non-Arab passports.

Mohammed said they included Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born Moroccan who had lived in Brixton, south London, from 1992-95.

The plan for a second wave of attacks on the west coast was dropped after Moussaoui was arrested at a Minnesota flight school a month before September 11. Until now it had been believed that Moussaoui was to have been the 20th member of the hijack gang that crashed the four planes.

The transcripts portray Mohammed, who trained as an engineer in America, as a frightening figure with an absolute disregard for human life and an obsession with devising spectacular ways of killing people.

He has made it clear that planning for the September 11 attacks had been going on for much longer than previously realised.

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