LONDON – Investigators on three continents worked to fill in the full, frightening picture Friday of a plot to blow U.S.-bound jetliners out of the Atlantic skies, tracking the money trail and seizing more alleged conspirators in the teeming towns of eastern Pakistan.
One arrested there, a Briton named Rashid Rauf, appears to have been the operational planner and is believed to have connections to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Pakistani and U.S. officials said.
British and Pakistani authorities have arrested as many as 41 people in the two countries in connection with the alleged suicide plan, broken up by British police this week, to detonate disguised liquid explosives aboard as many as 10 planes bound from Britain to the United States.
“The terrorists intended a second Sept. 11,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser.
London’s Evening Standard newspaper reported the plotters apparently chose next Wednesday as a target date, since they had tickets for a United Airlines flight that day, as well as ones for this Friday, apparently a test-run to see whether they could smuggle chemicals aboard in soft-drink containers.
The paper didn’t report the flight’s destination, but United has flights from Heathrow to New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.
Britain kept its threat assessment level at “critical,” indicative of an imminent attack. Extraordinary security measures continued at British airports, although the backlog of passengers eased from Thursday’s chaotic conditions, when hundreds of flights were canceled.
At U.S. airports, airlines were recruiting more baggage handlers as U.S. travelers, facing new rules banning almost all liquids from carry-on luggage, adapted by checking bags they normally would have carried aboard. American passengers faced a second level of security checks starting Friday, with random bag searches at boarding gates.
New information underlined how close the suspected plotters were to mounting attacks.
After the first arrests in Pakistan some days ago, word went from Pakistan to the London plotters to move ahead quickly, according to a message intercepted by an intelligence agency, a U.S. official disclosed. That prompted British police to move in on the conspirators, long under watch.
British Home Secretary John Reid said officials were confident the main suspects in the plot were in custody. But authorities “would go where any further evidence takes us,” he said.
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