The terror group also planned to replicate a 9/11 type of attack on London’s Heathrow airport by crashing a hijacked airliner into one of the terminals, the files showed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the nuclear device if the al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed, according to the classified files released by the whistle-blowing Website.
His nuclear threat was revealed in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, one of several media outlets that have published the classified assessments of detainees at Guantanamo.
Other files revealed a plot to put cyanide into air-conditioning units of public buildings across the US and to recruit ground staff at London’s Heathrow airport to make attacks on planes easier.
The German weekly, Der Spiegel, also citing WikiLeaks, said that Mr. Mohammed had told his interrogators he had set up two cells for the purpose of attacking Heathrow in 2002.
The aim was to seize control of an airliner shortly after takeoff from Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, turn it around and crash it into one of the four terminals.
Mr. Mohammed said one cell had been formed with the aim of taking flying lessons in Kenya, while the other had been tasked with recruiting participants.
He said the plot had been discussed several times at the highest level of al-Qaeda.
Another attack, which was given the green light in late 2001, would have targeted “the tallest buildings in California” using hijacked airliners, Der Spiegel reported.
The attackers would have gained access to the airliner cockpits by setting off small bombs hidden in their shoes, it said.
Mr. Mohammed, captured in 2003 in Pakistan, also claims to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan with his “blessed right hand,” and to have helped in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in the US that killed six people.
Der Spiegel noted that his “confessions” should be treated with caution as they may have been extracted through torture. Sheikh Mohammed is known to have undergone the controversial interrogation method known as “waterboarding.”
Former US president George W. Bush claimed in his memoirs published last year that using the interrogation technique—which simulates drowning—helped prevent planned attacks on Heathrow and London’s Canary Wharf business district.
He also told the London Times in November 2009 that it was “damn right” that he had authorized use of the method on Mr. Mohammed.
The leaked secret documents, however, also revealed that the US has botched the handling of inmates at Guantanamo, holding men for years without reliable evidence while releasing others who posed a grave threat.
Hundreds of inmates who turned out to have no serious terror links were held without trial, based on vague or inaccurate information, including accounts from unreliable fellow detainees or statements from men who had been abused or tortured, the New York Times quoted the documents as saying.
One poor Afghan farmer with no ties to militants was held for two years without trial in a case of mistaken identity, the documents showed.
But US authorities in 2004 decided to release Abdullah Mehsud, a Taliban extremist who duped his interrogators into believing the insurgents had conscripted him as a driver.
“[The] detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests,” said a 2003 document, quoted by the Times.
Mr. Mehsud, who gave a false name to his American interrogators, was sent back to Afghanistan where he organized a Taliban unit to assault US troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior ministry that claimed 31 lives, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers and set off a suicide bomb in 2007 in Pakistan—winning praise from
Osama bin Laden.
President Barack Obama’s administration, which has struggled to close the controversial Guantanamo prison, denounced the “unfortunate” release of the classified documents, part of a massive cache of secret memos leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010.
The government said in a statement the Obama and Bush administrations had “made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo.”
(Sara Ghasemilee of Al Arabiya
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