Foiled bomb plot inspired by daring World Trade Centre terrorist

The latest details emerging from yesterday's foiled terror plot bear a remarkable resemblance to one of the most daring attempts by Islamic-inspired terrorists to launch a series of devastating attacks against western airline targets.

In early January 1995, police in the Philippines capital Manila were called to investigate a fire in a flat rented by three South Asian men.

Initially they reported the incident as "just some Pakistanis playing with firecrackers" but what the police had actually uncovered was one of the most audacious terror plots to date: to smuggle liquid explosives onto 12 US airliners and detonate them simultaneously mid-flight.

The mastermind of the foiled attack was Ramzi Yousef, currently serving a life sentence in America for his role in trying to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993.

Yousef, the nephew of September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, fled to Pakistan after the New York attack which killed six people before moving onto the Philippines to perfect his terror campaign against the west.

With fellow conspirators Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah, Yousef hatched a plan to smuggle liquid nitroglycerin onto airliners hidden in contact lens solution bottles.

Nitroglycerin, Murad boasted after his arrest, was almost impossible to detect.

Using little more than a modified Casio watch as a timer, two 9v batteries and a detonator hidden in their shoes, the idea was to deliberately select flights that had a stopover and to assemble the bomb during the first leg of the journey before disembarking.

The explosives would then detonate once the planes were back up in the air.

The main plot, codenamed "Bojinka" after the Serbo-Croat for "loud bang", was abandoned following the flat fire.

But two months earlier Yousef was able to test a dry run of his plan.

In December 1994 he boarded a Philippines Airlines flight to Tokyo and assembled his bomb in the lavatory on the first leg of the flight from Manila to Cebu. He then placed his device in the lifejacket under his seat and disembarked.

Four hours later the device went off, killing Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami and wounding dozens of others.

Remarkably the plane stayed in one piece and the pilot was able to make an emergency landing.

Yousef's globalised approach to terrorism and desire to carry out momentous simultaneous attacks was widely regarded as a precursor to the September 11 hijackings.

Shaykh Muhammad, who financed the operation, reportedly decided after Bojinka that smuggling explosives onto airliners was too risky and that turning hijacked planes into flying bombs was a much safer way of carrying out catastrophic terrorist attacks.

Chief Superintendent Rodolfo Mendoza, one of the intelligence officers who uncovered the original Bojinka Plot, said there were definite similarities between the latest London plot and Yousef's plan.

"The modus operandi is the same, the method of delivery, the signature is there," he told AP.

"It might not be clear now, but there is a clear sign there, there is a parallelism in the mode of attack, delivery of the attack: mid-air explosions."

- INDEPENDENT