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2 NAILED IN HERALD SQ. SUBWAY BLAST PLOT
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August 28, 2004 -- The convention will be held at Madison Square Garden, located over Penn Station and a block west of the Herald Square subway station. The busy station serves hundreds of thousands of daily riders on the B, D, F, V, N, Q, R and W lines.
Sources said the threat was taken so seriously by officials that it was mentioned this week in a Department of Homeland Security memo.
The plot unraveled when the NYPD's Intelligence Division began conducting surveillance earlier this year on a group of Muslim men in Brooklyn.
One of the men arrested yesterday had been thrown out of the group, sources said.
"Whether this is al Qaeda or an unstable lone wolf doesn't make much of a difference as to the danger," said a law enforcement official.
The men, described as being in their 20s, don't appear to be connected with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, sources said.
During the course of the investigation of the Brooklyn group, cops learned the two men had mentioned they wanted to bomb a train and went so far as to draw up sketches of the station, sources said.
One of the men arrested was also jailed for three days in February in connection with an immigration matter, sources said.
A spokesman for the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office did not return calls seeking comment.
At the bookstore, the father of one of the men said his son was called by cops around 3 p.m. to go to the local precinct station house to discuss dropping charges about a fight that took place in the shop two months ago.
"He went for some papers and never came back," the dad said. "I'm very upset."
The father said he went to the station house where cops told him the matter was "a federal case."
Terrorists have tried to bomb the subway system before.
In 1997, two Jordanian men were arrested in Brooklyn for planning to detonate pipe bombs at the Atlantic Avenue station.
Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer and Lafi Khalil were busted after cops acting on a tip from a man who lived with the duo burst into their Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment and arrested them.
Abu Mezer was sentenced to life in prison in 1999 for trying to hatch the bomb plot.
Khalil was acquitted of being involved in the bomb plot, but sentenced to three years in prison in 1998 on immigration fraud charges.
Additional reporting by Patrick Gallahue
