Was Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 taken down by a shoe bomber? That’s the latest rumor going around. Muslim Saajid Badat a British terrorist who along with 2001 shoe bomber Richard Reid claims he gave a group of Malaysians (including a pilot) has shoe bombing devices. While the UK Daily Mail story is interesting, it’s still pure speculation if the plane was brought down was a shoe bomb, or any explosive. We still don’t even know if the three large pieces found in the South China Sea on March 9th, just south of Vietnam are even from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Boeing 777.
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| Was MH370 brought down by shoe bomber provided by Saajid Badat? – Image credit: Daily Mail UK |
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IA British man convicted of plotting an Al-Qaeda plane bombing told a New York court yesterday about a separate 2001 plan for a Malaysian pilot to blast his way into a jet’s cockpit.
Saajid Badat, who was sentenced in 2005 to 13 years in jail as a co-conspirator in a notorious December 2001 plot to bomb US airliners, has testified about the Malaysian plan before.
But his description of the apparently abandoned plot has a new resonance as investigators probe the fate of a Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared on Saturday with 239 people on board.
He believed one bomb was enough to bring down a jet, he told the trial by video link from Britain, but the bomb he gave the Malaysian was intended simply to help him breach a cockpit door.
Badat said he travelled from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001 with Reid, some Malaysians and a Mauritanian family.
He described the Malaysians as ‘their own group of four to five individuals including a pilot’.
‘I gave one of my shoes to the Malaysians. I think it was to access the cockpit,’ he told the court.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-declared 9/11 plotter now held at Guantanamo Bay, helped concoct the shoe-bomb plot and spoke of having plans for the Malaysians, Badat said.