Code: ZE01101103

Date: 2001-10-11

3 Plots Against John Paul II´s Life Foiled Since 1995

Bill Clinton and Press Sources Point to Terrorists

ROME, OCT. 11, 2001 (Zenit.org).- In recent years, John Paul II has been the object of at least three failed plots on his life by fundamentalist terrorist groups, according to political and press sources.

On Wednesday, former U.S. President Bill Clinton confirmed that in January 1995 a plan was thwarted to assassinate the Pope during his trip to the Philippines.

According to the CIA, the mastermind behind the plot was terrorist Ramzy Youssef, who two years earlier organized the first attack on New York´s Twin Towers. Some say Youssef is Kuwaiti, others Iraqi.

The story of this attempt on the Pope´s life has been referred to several times by different sources, but it is the first time that a person of the stature of a U.S. president has mentioned it.

Also on Wednesday, the Italian press agency AP.Biscom revealed that during the Holy Father´s recent visit to Syria, a Muslim fundamentalist group had planned to have a kamikaze woman outfitted with explosives throw herself against the "popemobile" in the old city of Damascus. After the explosion, terrorists nearby were to open fire at will.

According to AP.Biscom, the attack was avoided because the CIA informed the Vatican on the eve of the trip, and the latter sent the information to Syria´s secret service, which adopted very stringent security measures.

Today, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera revealed that a Pakistani citizen was detained in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 4. According to U.S. investigators and the FBI, he belonged to a terrorist network with associates in Italy and other European countries which was planning to attack the Vatican.

Last month, a NATO source told Corriere della Sera that al-Qaida extremists, funded by Osama bin Laden, selected 30 possible targets, among which was one "of high religious value."

Posted at 9:47 p.m. EDT Friday, August 21, 1998

Men in papal plot termed close to bin Laden

By JOHN MINTZ
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Among the more surprising assertions in the list of terrorist plots attributed by the Clinton administration Friday to Osama bin Laden was that the Saudi-born millionaire had planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

U.S. intelligence officials said Friday that the reference, made by President Clinton and other officials, was to an aborted 1995 plan to blow up the pope during a visit to the Philippines using a fragmentary bomb and a timer inside a digital watch. Although they provided no direct evidence tying the plans to bin Laden himself, they said the two men blamed for the plot -- Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Wali Khan Shah -- had financial, ideological and personal connections to the bin Laden terrorism ``network.''

Bin Laden previously had been linked by U.S. officials to many of the most notorious terrorist attacks or plots of the 1990s, several of which Clinton cited in his Oval Office address Thursday explaining the U.S. cruise missile attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan. They included a 1993 assault on U.S. servicemen in Somalia that left 18 dead and the 1995 attempt on the life of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia. In addition, Clinton said bin Laden was involved in the suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan that killed 15 people, and last year's attack on an Egyptian tourist site in which 62 tourists were shot or stabbed to death.

But in tying nearly every major terrorist attack or uncovered plot tied to Islamic extremists in recent years to groups ``associated with'' bin Laden, the Clinton administration elevated the exiled Saudi to a new public status. The description of links between bin Laden and assassination attempts against the pope was among the most surprising on the list.

Recent threats against the life of the pope have emanated from various quarters, according to U.S. officials. In April last year, Bosnian police discovered a bomb -- consisting of more than 20 anti-tank mines and 50-plus pounds of plastic explosives -- hidden under a bridge that the pope was scheduled to cross during a visit. Western intelligence agencies concluded that the bomb had been laid by an Iranian-controlled network.

European investigators also detected two separate plots on the pope's life in Italy last year, one in the spring and one last September also thought to be instigated by Iran, U.S. officials said. In the second plan, an alleged hit team of Bosnians, Turks, Tunisians and Algerians plotted to bomb the pontiff on a visit to Bologna, the U.S. officials said.

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the pope has become a regular subject for at least rhetorical attack by Islamic fundamentalists led by Iran and Sudan.

``They see the Pope as a challenge to the spread of Islam around the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia,'' Bodansky said. ``They believe the Pope is a symbol of a benevolent church'' who doesn't fit their bitter characterizations of wicked Westerners. ``That's why they think he has to be stopped,'' he said.

U.S. officials said the plot against the pope that Clinton referred to Wednesday was uncovered in January 1995, when Filipino firemen were summoned to a Manila apartment to check out smoke billowing from the windows. The firefighters found smoldering chemicals in the empty apartment, and called police. U.S. and Filipino authorities later confiscated a computer disk that described plans to blow up a dozen 747 jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean and to assassinate John Paul II.

Inside the apartment, near the papal nuncio's residence where the pope was set to stay a few days later, investigators also found materials for a large pipe bomb, maps of the pope's itinerary, Bibles and priests' cassocks. Authorities later arrested the two men who had rented the apartment, Yousef and Khan.

Both were later convicted in New York of conspiring to blow up 4,000 passengers in the 747s, which they planned to do by mixing chemicals into explosives in airplane lavatories before leaving at scheduled stopovers. Yousef, a 20-something bomb-building vagabond, was also convicted of actually setting an explosive on a Philippines Airlines flight that killed a Japanese traveler, and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan that killed six people and injured 1,000.

Details cited by U.S. officials in tying bin Laden to the plots include the Saudi's ownership of the house in Pakistan where Yousef was living when he was arrested in 1995. In addition, some bin Laden companies supplied Yousef with funds during his terrorist operations. In New York, Yousef was associated with an Islamic group called the Al-Kifah Center, itself tied to Maktab al-Kidmat, a Pakistani organization co-founded by bin Laden.

Khan has been friendly with bin Laden since they fought side-by-side against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. ``He was nicknamed 'The Lion,' '' bin Laden told ABC News of his comrade in arms. ``He is one of the best. We were good friends.''

But Khan was less loyal to his old chum. He recently became a cooperating witness for the FBI and CIA in their work on bin Laden and others in his terrorist network.