A PLOT by foreign terrorists to bomb underground train and road tunnels in New York with the aim of flooding the Wall Street financial district has been thwarted, the FBI said yesterday.

The main target of the Islamic extremists, one of whom is an al-Qaeda member and under arrest in Beirut, was the Holland Tunnel, the main road link between Manhattan and New Jersey that runs under the Hudson River. It carried almost 35 million vehicles in 2005.

The alleged plot was discovered during monitoring of internet chat rooms used by extremists. It also involved bombing the New York subway.

Mark J. Mershon, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said that there were eight principal players in the plot. Three were in custody abroad and six nations had been involved in the investigation, he added. None of the plotters had ever been in the US or obtained materials to stage an attack.

The FBI added that the plotters had discussed driving vehicles laden with explosives into several tunnels around Manhattan and then blowing them up.

Mr Mershon said that the plot would have involved “martyrdom, explosives” in some of the tunnels that connected New Jersey and Manhattan. Earlier, FBI officials said that information gleaned from the internet suggested that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed by a US bomb last month, had agreed to back the plot financially. But there was no evidence that any money was sent or explosives bought.

One suspect, a Lebanese native, known as Amir al-Andalousi and an al-Qaeda member, was arrested in Beirut a month ago on the request of US authorities. Lebanese officials said that his real name was Assem Hammoud, and that he had confessed. “He was planning to travel to Pakistan for four months’ training and that the date for the attack was decided to be late 2006,” the Lebanese Interior Ministry said in a statement.

FBI officials said that the plot had been in its planning stages. The timetable for the attack was October or November. It was also pointed out that any plan to flood Wall Street would have failed because Lower Manhattan lies above the level of the Hudson River.

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