SHOE-BOMB TURNCOAT
Turns canary on hook fiend
A selfproclaimed reformed terrorist who had a lastminute change of heart and pulled out of shoe bomber Richard Reid’s failed bid to blow up an airliner two months after 9/11 is in line to be the prosecution’s star witness in the terror trial of handless hate preacher Abu Hamza alMasri, The Post has learned.
The feds filed legal papers last week seeking Manhattan federal Judge Katherine Forrest’s OK to have the “cooperating witness” testify at the April trial against the oneeyed, hookhanded terror suspect via closedcircuit TV from the United Kingdom.
Assistant US Attorney Ian McGinley doesn’t name the witness in the filing — describing him in a footnote only as someone who “agreed to participate” with Reid in “al Qaeda’s socalled ‘shoe bomb’ plot” aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001.
But court records indicate the witness is Saajid Muhammad Badat, who is free in Britain after cut ting a 2010 deal with British authorities. He could be arrested if he steps foot in the United States.
Badat claims he emailed Reid a week before their planned suicide mission to say he was backing out, and then rejected terrorism to become an Islamic religious teacher.
McGinley said the witness’ testimony would help prove alMasri — whose radical Islamic sermons inspired Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui — “was a terrorist leader of global reach, who, among other things, sent his young lieutenants around the world to engage in terror training.”
If Forrest approves the motion, Badat would be in line to help bring down two top al Qaeda operatives within months in separate Manhattan fed eral trials, by testifying from more than 3,000 miles away.
Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan two weeks ago granted the feds’ request to let him testify in the Feb. 24 terror trial of Osama bin Laden’s soninlaw Sulaiman Abu Ghayth.
Badat — whom the feds have yet to identify in that case also — is expected to tell jurors he attended terrorist training camps in which Abu Ghayth gave trainees warfare speeches.
Badat, like Reid, was given shoe bombs by al Qaeda leaders based in Afghanistan to detonate aboard Flight 63, but Badat dismantled his device and stored it at his parents’ home in England.
Reid is serving life in prison after passengers and crew subdued him.
Badat kept mum as Reid went along with the plan. He pleaded guilty to conspiring in the shoebombing plot and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
He was released in 2010 after agreeing to assist US and British authorities in other terror cases, including helping put away for life Adis Medunjanin, a suspect in a failed 2009 plot to attack New York City’s subways with suicide bombs.