Regional Focus: The Caribbean

18 Apr 2011

In February 2011, Russell Defreitas, a US citizen born in Guyana and a former baggage handler at New York’s JFK Airport, was sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to blow up fuel tanks and a pipeline at the airport.  The 40 mile long pipeline also serves LaGuardia and Newark airports. Defreitas is the alleged ring-leader of a cell whose plan was hatched in the Caribbean, a region, with the exception of the location of the US high security military base at Guantanamo Bay, usually associated with tourism not terrorism.  

Co-defendant Abdul Kadir, a former member of the Guyana parliament, received the same sentence in December 2010, Abdul Nur, also a Guyana national, received 15 years in January and the fourth man charged, Trinidadian national Kareem Ibrahim, is awaiting trial due to take place in May 2011.  The men wanted to avenge the treatment by the US of Muslims around the world. They were arrested in 2007; Defreitas in New York and the others in Trinidad and Tobago, after Defreitas unwittingly recruited an FBI informant to help him with the plot.  According to prosecutors, the men sought to offer their plans to Jamaat al Muslimeen, an Islamist extremist group in Trinidad and Tobago, under surveillance by the US National Security Agency and CIA for links to organised crime, terrorist organisations and terrorist activity.  Defreitas and the informant travelled to Guyana to meet with Kadir to show him video surveillance tapes of the airport’s fuel farms and attempted to meet with Jamaat al Muslimeen and Adnan Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born senior al-Qaeda operative and explosives expert, seen by the FBI as al-Qaeda’s ‘Director of Operations’ believed to be based in the Caribbean at that time. Prosecutors said that the plot never got past the planning stage.  There is however, much debate in the media over the intelligence levels and serious intent of the plot by the men, all of whom are in their late 50s and 60s, as some of Defreitas’ claims during his trial bordered on the ridiculous, including that one of his ideas was to send in Ninjas to attack JFK! 

In 2002 the Organisation of American States adopted the Inter-American Convention against Terrorism, overseen by the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (CICTE), whose mission is to prevent, combat and eliminate terrorism.  In March 2011, the Caribbean nation of Grenada assumed the Chair. The Caribbean’s close proximity to the US, the main focus of al-Qaeda and related groups’ attacks on the West, make it potentially very vulnerable to terrorist activity and a possible springboard into the US. MORE ONLINE

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