2004 Financial buildings plot

The 2004 financial buildings plot was a plan led by Dhiren Barot to attack a number of targets in the U.S. and the United Kingdom which is believed to have been approved by al-Qaeda. The evidence against the plotters consisted of home videos, written notes, and files on computers. At the time of the arrests the group had no funding, vehicles, or access to bomb-making equipment.

All eight suspects pleaded guilty in a British court, Barot was sentenced to 40 years in jail. The trials of seven co-defendants began in April 2007 and in June 2007 these seven were sentenced to a total of 136 years in prison.

The plots which were uncovered were in the form of proposals found on a laptop seized in Pakistan, notebooks and videos found in the possession of the suspects after their arrests, and in deleted files on a hard disk. Although Barot had been under surveillance since 15 June 2004, a counter-terrorism source admitted that there was little or no admissible evidence against him at the time of his arrest on 3 August 2004.

The plan was formulated by Barot while he was in New York posing as a student in 2000 and 2001 prior to the 11 September attacks, of which he apparently had no foreknowledge. Barot's targets were the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington, D.C.; the and Citigroup buildings in New York City; and the Prudential headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.

He wrote a series of detailed reports describing the importance of the targets, the outlines of the buildings, and the logistics of mounting an explosive attack. He also visited and filmed them from the street in a series of short clips that were discovered in the middle of a copy of the movie Die Hard. The images of this evidence have been posted on the web.

The plans appeared to have been shelved after the successful al-Qaeda attacks on those cities on 11 September.

There is strong skepticism in several quarters regarding whether any of these plots could have gone ahead without arousing suspicion, or were even superficially viable. For instance, no terrorist bombmakers have succeeded in using commercial gas cylinders to collapse a building.

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