A one-time terror-loving shoe bomber said Tuesday it was his nagging parents who convinced him to have a last-minute change of heart and pull out of shoe bomber Richard Reid’s failed bid to blow up an airliner two months after 9/11.
“You better not be one of those sleepers,” Saajid Badat recalled his father saying while testifying as the government’s star witness in the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law.
“It was then that I decided to back out of it.”
Testifying via video link from London for a second day in the Manhattan federal court terror trial of Abu Ghaith, Badat confided how he then contacted an al-Qaeda member and told him to “tell Van Damme he’ll be on his own,” referring to the nickname given to Reid based on Hollywood action star Jean Claude Van Damme.
Badat, like Reid, was given shoe bombs by al-Qaeda leaders based in Afghanistan to detonate aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001. Badat said he dismantled his device and stored it at his parents’ home in England until he was busted three years later.
Badat on Tuesday also revealed how, prior to the botched Flight 63 attack, he wore a shoe bomb on at least one flight from Pakistan to Holland and another from Holland to Great Britain just weeks after 9/11, in early December 2001. He said he opted not to detonate it because he wanted to use it for an attack against an aircraft flying over America.
He said he was left with only one shoe bomb because he gave his other one to a group of Malaysian men seeking to blow open a plane’s cockpit door and carry out a Sept. 11-style hijacking of their own.
Badat said he opted to keep his remaining bomb compartments because he thought “maybe there would be a time when I would need it again…for an attack.”
While Reid was subdued by passengers and crew during his botched terror attack and is now serving a life sentence, Badat was nabbed as an accomplice three years later by British authorities before ultimately being released from prison in 2010 after agreeing to be a cooperating government witness.
Prosecutors are banking on Badat’s testimony to help prove Abu Ghaith was at the center of al-Qaeda’s efforts to kill more Americans in a second wave of terror attacks following 9/11.
Abu Ghaith could face life in prison if he is convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to al-Qaida. He is the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative to face trial on U.S. soil since 9/11.
Abu Ghaith’s lawyers contend the government cannot link their client to Badat or any terrorist activity.
Badat – who will also be the star government witness in the April Manhattan federal court trial of handless hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri — opted to testify via videotape because he still faces charges in the United States for conspiring with Reid.
Offering a taste of his potential testimony in that trial, he recalled how al-Masri once asked him how he’d feel about taking an explosive on a plane and blowing it up.
“I remember asking if I would be killed in the explosion and he said ‘yes,’ and I decided ‘yes, I would be willing to do this,’” said Badat, who’s been nicknamed a “supergrass” by the British press, referring to the British slang for “snitch.”
Badat also said he saw bin Laden between 30 and 50 times in al-Qaida training camps. He said bin Laden once asked him if he knew “the significance” of the shoe-bombing plot.
Badat said bin Laden told him, “the American economy is like a chain…and if you break one link, you’ll bring down the American economy.”