BLASTER PLANNED TO NUKE TWIN TOWERS: BOOK By KIRSTEN DANIS

The mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing came frighteningly close to using radioactive material in the attack - and could have turned lower Manhattan into an uninhabitable wasteland, a new book claims.

Ramzi Yousef didn't have time to make an atom bomb - but hoped to use conventional explosives to spread the deadly isotopes over New York, journalist Simon Reeve writes in "The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism."

"New York would have been paralyzed and mass panic would have undoubtedly have caused evacuation of the entire city," Reeve writes.

The book, which hits shelves tomorrow, claims the now-imprisoned Yousef is just one of a new breed of terrorists developing weapons of mass destruction to topple the United States and its allies in a fiery apocalypse.

Yousef no doubt would have laced the Twin Towers bomb with unstable, cancer-causing radiation - but a co-conspirator was unable to buy it from contacts in the former Soviet Union, Reeve quotes intelligence sources as saying.

"To be honest, it's not something we like to think about, let alone talk about," one intelligence source said.

Yousef, 31, is serving a 240-year federal prison sentence for launching the Feb. 26, 1993, World Trade Center attack that killed six people - the deadliest act of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil.

Yousef, whose real name is Abdul Basit Karim, had hoped to knock one of the Twin Towers into the other and slaughter 250,000 people.

The Kuwaiti-born Yousef rose from humble roots to become one of the most sought-after terrorists in the Muslim militant world, the book charges.

Yousef claims to be religious but beat his young wife, flirted with women and did not observe Ramadan, the holy month of fasting - all contrary to Islam, the book says.

Multimillionaire terrorism sponsor bin Laden contacted Yousef to carry out some of his deadliest goals, the book says. Before Yousef was captured in Pakistan in early 1995, the young militant plotted a series of horrifying terrorist attacks:

*In the "Bojinka Plot," five terrorists led by Yousef planned to simultaneously explode 11 U.S. airplanes over the Pacific Ocean - killing at least 4,000 people. The plot crumbled when Yousef's Manila apartment caught fire while he was making bombs.

*Yousef tested his tiny nitroglycerin bombs on a Japan-bound plane and killed one passenger who was sitting over an explosive.

*He launched a summer 1994 bombing on a Shiite Muslim shrine in Iran that killed 26 people.

*He tried several times to come up with a foolproof way to assassinate President Clinton and Pope John Paul II - at the behest of bin Laden.

*He was offered $68,000 to help kill then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

-- a (a@a.a), October 24, 1999

Answers

Should have been OT:. Sorry.

http://www.nypostonline.com/news/10200.htm

-- a (a@a.a), October 24, 1999.

>>>Yousef claims to be religious but beat his young wife,<<<

Well, one must understand the position of women in Islam. A wife BELONGS to her husband (he can have four), and a little wife-beating might be necessary to keep them all in line.

>>>flirted with women<<<

Muhammed made his adopted son give up his wife so the prophet himself could marry her. With that as an example, what even half-way reasonable Islamic wife would consider complaining about a little flirting?

>>>and did not observe Ramadan<<<

Oops, now that's a serious no-no, almost as bad as forgetting to kill Christians, which is what Islamic terrorism is all about, you know. Islam has been at war with the West since AD634. After the Battle of Tours, AD732, we kinda forgot their Jihad, but the radical Muslims have not.

-- Elskon (elskon@bigfoot.com), October 24, 1999.

This doesn't pass the smell test...and is probably disinformation.

First, there is not one shred of evidence that time was what constrained this Youssef fella from building an atomic bomb. I'd like to know that he had the fissle before I buy into that.

Second, I believe the FBI was implicated in the plot through at least one informant who didn't trust the FBI and who ran an audiotape sting on them.

In other words, just where is the dividing line between gathering information on a plot and active participation?? In the World Trade Center case, that line seems to have been cut RAZOR THIN, of it existed at all.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), October 25, 1999.