The documents, found on a memory disk that housed the movie and was confiscated from suspected al-Qaida members Maqsood Lodin and Yusuf Ocak last May, revealed terrorist group’s plans for the future and documents of past attacks.

One of the most chilling prospects was a plan to hijack a ship, then execute the passengers one-by-one unless authorities succumbed to al-Qaida’s demand to release certain prisoners. In signs of protest, terrorists would dress passengers in the likeness of al-Qaida prisoners at the U.S.’ Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where numerous abuse cases involving inmates were reported.

Even more disturbing is al-Qaida’s plan to encourage more so-called lone wolf attacks, where an individual terrorist carries out an attack without help from the organization.

“The author seems to be convinced that al-Qaida should be pursuing a two-track strategy of low cost-low damage attacks and large-scale attacks (like 9/11),” said Yassin Musharbash, a reporter from German newspaper Die Zeit.

Musharbash says the reason for the two-track plan is to ensure that some damage is done even if massive attack plans are thwarted.

Sure enough, Europe has been hit with a string of one-man attacks, in the latest of which an al-Qaida-influenced gunman Mohamed Mera killed seven people in France in March.

The terrorist group often does not even contact individual terrorists, but simply influences them to take radical action through magazines they publish via a Yemen-based group.

Richard Fadden, head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, says al-Qaida pursuing small-scale attacks is causing problems because they “do not belong to a larger network” and thus, are harder to predict.

Investigators also found detailed information of operations in the past, including the infamous Mumbai attack in 2008, during which three terrorists massacred 164 people, and the 2005 London subway blast that killed 52 and injured hundreds.

Officials discovered that while al-Qaida also considered attacking the Bank of England and G-8 summit in Scotland, it chose to blow up the subway because it required less explosives.

Since the 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden, the founder and leader of al-Qaida, the wide-spread perception was that the group has lost its driving force to terrorize the world.

However, the recent find suggests that the group is ready to get back into action as soon as they are armed with sufficient resources, including men who are ready to devote themselves to the cause of pure destruction.



By Yoon Min-sik

(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)