Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11 attacks, is planning assaults on civilian targets on an unprecedented scale, a senior U.S. diplomat warned on Thursday. “These terrorists continue to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan, conduct assaults in Bali and elsewhere, and continue to plan attacks to inflict civilian casualties on an unprecedented scale,” Pierre-Richard Prosper, U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, wrote in a Swedish newspaper. Around 3,000 people died in the September 11 plane hijacking attacks in New York and Washington. Nearly 200 people were killed in a bomb blast in the Indonesian tourist island of Bali last year in an attack blamed on a group said to have links to al Qaeda. Prosper said interviews with suspected members of al-Qaeda detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba had already helped prevent attacks. “Information we have obtained from detainees in Guantanamo has helped thwart attacks in Europe and elsewhere and bring more terrorists to justice,” Prosper wrote in the article for the Swedish Dagens Nyheter daily. “Continuing to obtain such information from detainees is crucial to stopping future attacks and ultimately defeating terrorism,” he said. Full Story
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