Al Qaeda plotted aircraft strikes on the West Coast post 9/11

Other plots, none of which were executed, included filling an apartment with leaked natural gas and detonating it, blowing up gas stations and even cutting the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge, New York Times reported quoting leaked Guantanamo Bay files.

According to the classified military files, the plotter was 63-year-old Pakistani American national Saifullah Paracha who told his military interrogators that he had met al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in a trip to Afghanistan in December 1999 or January 2000.

Paracha said new terror schemes were explored to follow up on the 9/11 hijack attacks and he had worked closely with the September 11 attacks mastermind Khaled Shaikh Mohammad who gave him USD 500,000 to 600,000 for safekeeping.

Paracha also discussed obtaining biological or nuclear weapons but had been deterred by detectors at ports which would make it difficult to smuggle radioactive material into the country. However, most of the plots fizzled out after Shaikh Mohammad was captured by the CIA.

The Guantanamo Bay files said it appeared that all the plots were almost family affair as Khalid Shaikh, the terrorist network's top plotter, and his nephew Ammar al-Balochi who was married to another militant American trained neuroscientist Asfia Siddiqi. And then there was Paracha and his son Uzair.

Times said the portrait of Paracha was one of the striking ones to emerge from the files, having attended the New York Institute of Technology in the early seventies and set up a travel agency in the city for 13 years.

Paracha was arrested in Bangkok in July 2003 on information given by his son Uzair who was already in FBI custody. The Pakistani told the interrogators that he had offered his broadcasting business in Pakistan to generate propaganda films for al Qaeda when he met bin Laden.

After 9/11 Paracha focused on new plots and also told his interrogators that he had worked with disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist A Q Khan.