Iraqi official: Large-scale plot thwarted [View All]

[ECH1969]

Iraq's interior minister on Tuesday said authorities had foiled an al Qaeda plot that would have put hundreds of its men at critical guard posts around Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, home to the U.S. and other foreign embassies as well as the Iraqi government.

A senior Defense Ministry official said the 421 al Qaeda fighters were recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials have been jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the 421 al Qaeda recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.

"You can imagine what could happen to a minister or an ambassador while passing through these gates when those terrorists are there," Jabr said in the interview conducted at his office inside the Green Zone -- a 2-square-mile (3-kilometer) hunk of prime Baghdad real estate on the west bank of the Tigris River.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/03/14/iraq.plotthwarted.ap/index.html
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A number of high ranking Defense Ministry officals including two generals from what I hear were on the take and bribed hundreds of thousands to help the plot along.