Metro

B’klyn thug is Qaeda’s new chief

A Muslim radical who grew up in Brooklyn — and plotted terror attacks on Kennedy Airport and the subway system — has become al Qaeda’s chief of worldwide operations, the FBI disclosed yesterday.

Adnan Shukrijumah spent 15 of his 35 years in the United States and has assumed the post held by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, FBI counterterrorism agent Brian LeBlanc said.

He was one of three members of al Qaeda’s “external operations council” until the other two men were killed by US drone attacks along the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving him in charge of choosing where al Qaeda would strike next. He is believed to be hiding in the lawless Waziristan region of Pakistan.

“He’s making operational decisions is the best way to put it,” LeBlanc, the FBI’s lead Shukrijumah investigator, told The Associated Press. “He’s looking at attacking the US and other Western countries.”

His obsession with destroying America in general — and New York in particular — was revealed when he was named as a key figure in the 2007 plot to blow up JFK Airport and the 2009 conspiracy to bomb the subway system.

Shukrijumah’s rise from son of a Brooklyn imam to dishwasher at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan to someone who keeps in regular contact with Osama bin Laden has been analyzed by US officials.

Shukrijumah came to the United States as a teen in the 1980s. His father preached at Brooklyn’s al-Farouq Mosque until he moved the family to Florida in 1995. Shukrijumah, who sold used cars and held other odd jobs, managed to obtain a green card by lying on his application.

In the late 1990s, he went to Afghanistan for terror training.

Shukrijumah returned to the United States and, in spring 2001, allegedly did research for a plot to sink a freighter in the Panama Canal. He left the States in May and hasn’t been seen since 2003.

Yesterday, one of the suspects in the 2009 subway-bomb plot was taken into Brooklyn federal court to face an additional charge, that he used his car as a terror-suicide weapon.

“We love death more than you love life,” Adis Medunjanin, 26, allegedly shouted as he plowed his car into an unsuspecting motorist while fleeing federal agents on the Whitestone Expressway on Jan. 7.

He pleaded not guilty to the new charge.

Additional reporting by Janon Fisher