Bomb Clinched Verdict Against Baghdad

The clincher in concluding that Iraq sponsored the car bomb attempt on George Bush’s life was that the huge explosive device seized by authorities bore striking similarities to a bomb used by Iraqi agents in Turkey during the Gulf War, government sources said Saturday night.

FBI interviews of all 16 plot participants also buttressed the forensic evidence and the conclusion that Iraq directed the attempt, a Justice Department official said.

Shortly after the scheme was discovered and the plotters captured, a team of FBI technicians and experts flew to Kuwait city and began disassembling and analyzing the large, 175-pound bomb found concealed inside the body panels of a white Toyota Land Cruiser. Detonation wiring was concealed under the front floorboard.

The bomb possessed devastating power and was designed so that it could be detonated by manual remote control or by timer. The vehicle itself was to be part of the killing device by sending shards of metal at a high velocity, with power to kill people within a radius of 400 yards, government officials said.

Over a two-month period, agents compared what they found with other devices planted successfully and unsuccessfully by terrorists of various origins in targets around the world.

“Key components, including the remote-control firing device, the plastic explosives, the blasting cap, the integrated circuitry and the wiring were built or modified by the same person or persons who built or modified bombs previously recovered from the Iraqis,” a senior intelligence official said in an interview.

Photographs of the radio-controlled firing system showed it to be visually indistinguishable from one used in the bomb planted in Turkey.

The link was too strong to be a coincidence. “ . . . Iraq planned, equipped and ran the terrorist operation that threatened the life of President Bush in Kuwait city in April,” the intelligence official said.

Sixteen suspects were arrested by Kuwaiti authorities in the plot. They allegedly smuggled the bomb hidden in the vehicle across the Iraq-Kuwait border during the night of April 12.

In interviewing the 16 suspects now on trial in Kuwait, FBI agents became convinced that they were being given an accurate description of what took place by questioning them separately and outside the presence of their Kuwaiti captors, officials said.

“All were interviewed several times, and everything fit together,” one official said. But one senior official acknowledged that the U.S. questioners could not be certain that earlier torture of the suspects had not influenced their tales, thus making the forensic examination all the more important.

The two main suspects--Ra’ad Assadi and Wali Ghazali--are Iraqi nationals. They told the FBI that they had been recruited and given orders in Basra, Iraq, “from individuals they believed to be associated with the Iraqi intelligence service,” the senior intelligence official said.

Iraqi recruiters provided the two suspects with the car bomb and other explosives in Basra on April 12, the suspects told FBI agents.

“One of the suspects, Ghazali, told the FBI that he was recruited for the specific purpose of assassinating President Bush in Kuwait city,” the senior intelligence official said.

“The other main suspect, Assadi, told the FBI that his task was to guide al-Ghazali and the car bomb to Kuwait University (where Bush and the emir of Kuwait were scheduled to appear) and to plant smaller explosives elsewhere in Kuwait,” the official said.

The senior intelligence official said that based on all available evidence, “the CIA is highly confident that the Iraqi government, at the highest levels, directed its intelligence service to assassinate former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait on April 14-16, 1993.”