Conspirators
Although Reid had insisted that he had acted alone and had built the bombs himself, a palm print and a strand of hair not belonging to Reid were found in the bomb materials. Later on, a British-born man, Saajid Badat from Gloucester, England, admitted that he had conspired with Richard Reid and a Tunisian man who is in jail in Belgium, Nizar Trabelsi, in a plot to blow up two airliners bound for the United States more-or-less simultaneously, using their shoe bombs. Badat has said that he had been instructed to board a flight from Amsterdam to the United States. Badat never got on board the flight, and he withdrew from his part of the conspiracy. However, Badat did not warn criminal or aviation authorities about the dangers of Mr. Reid. Badat confessed immediately after being arrested by the British police. The detonator cord in Badat's bomb was found by experts to be an exact match for cord on Reid's bomb, and their explosive chemicals were essentially identical. Badat said that he had received the bomb-making materials from an Arab in Afghanistan. Badat was sentenced to 13 years in prison by a British judge.
Read more about this topic: Richard Reid
Famous quotes containing the word conspirators:
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)