British Student Charged With Terrorist Conspiracy

British authorities charged a 24-year-old student Wednesday with conspiring to carry out bomb attacks with terrorists including Richard Reid, the Al Qaeda “shoe bomber” convicted in the United States of trying to bring down a Paris-to-Miami flight two years ago.

Sajid Badat, a Briton of Pakistani descent, was also charged with unlawful possession of explosives. Police filed the charges a week after arresting Badat at his home in Gloucester, where they also found a small quantity of plastic explosives. They also searched the nearby Islamic college where he studied.

The conspiracy charge indicates that police have found evidence they believe backs their suspicions that Badat was an Al Qaeda operative. Badat’s friends have said they find the allegations against him incredible.

The alleged connection to Reid suggests that police also think Badat could be key to identifying a still-mysterious network in Europe that aided Reid, a hulking British ex-convict who was subdued by passengers and crew members as he attempted to blow up an American Airlines jet on Dec. 22, 2001.

Authorities charged Wednesday that “between the 1st day of September 2001 and the 28th day of November 2003,” Badat “conspired with Richard Reid and others unknown to cause by an explosive device an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.”

The time period outlined in the charges is significant. The two Britons allegedly had contact after Reid returned from Pakistan to Europe in August 2001. Reid soon embarked on a multi-country odyssey to prepare for his bomb attack, authorities say. He worked odd jobs in Amsterdam and obtained a new British passport in Belgium to conceal his trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he had trained in an Al Qaeda camp.

Reid spent the week before his flight in Paris, where witnesses spotted him in a tough immigrant neighborhood at a cyber cafe from which authorities say he communicated via Internet with his Al Qaeda handlers in Pakistan.

French investigators say Reid had contact with groups of Pakistani and North African extremists in France, Belgium, Britain and the Netherlands. Accomplices probably provided the cash with which he bought his ticket, gave him a place to stay and, most important, undertook the specialized task of packing plastic explosives into his high-top basketball shoes, investigators say. Despite a few arrests during the past year, however, the investigation has failed to identify the bomb-maker or other accomplices.

Police did not say where Badat allegedly met Reid, whose descent into extremism began at London mosques that served as ideological and recruiting centers for Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Badat spent five years studying religion in Pakistan, where Reid had extensive contact with terrorist networks. Like Reid, Badat has the profile that European law enforcement most fears: a European passport and upbringing that gave him freedom of movement and cultural camouflage.

Because Reid has been behind bars for two years, the charges make clear that police believe Badat continued to conspire with other alleged terrorists after the shoe bomber’s arrest. The capture of Badat and two dozen other suspects during the past week has reinforced fears Islamic terrorists are intent on striking in Britain or against British interests elsewhere.

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Rotella reported from Paris and Stobart from London.