PARIS - French intelligence warned their American counterparts, eight months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, that Al-Qaeda planned to hijack a US-bound plane, according to documents seen by AFP.
Details of the plot by Osama bin Laden's group was passed to the Central Intelligence Agency's Paris bureau chief eight months before the attacks on New York and Washington, Le Monde newspaper reported in its account on the report.
The plan was to hijack a US-bound plane flying from Frankfurt in Germany and take it to Kandahar in Afghanistan, according to the file by the DGSE external intelligence service.
The presumed chief September 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, ran an Al-Qaeda cell in the German city of Hamburg.
The plot was allegedly drawn up by Al-Qaeda with the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and Chechen rebels.
But there was no discussion of flying the plane to the United States to smash it into a building there, which is what Al-Qaeda hijackers did when they seized four planes in September 2001 in attacks that left 3,000 people dead.
The DGSE document says that by October 2000 bin Laden had decided his next action against the United States would involve a hijacking, but that at this time there was still disagreement among Al-Qaeda leaders over the exact details of the attack.
Al-Qaeda had in 1998 carried out simultaneous bomb attacks on the US embassies Tanzania and Kenya that left hundreds dead.
A 2004 report on the September 11 attacks by the US Congress highlighted failures by US intelligence services to gather and share information that might have helped prevent the attacks.
The DGSE declined to comment on the 2001 when contacted by AFP.
The file, titled "Aircaft hijack plan by radical Islamists," was part of 328 pages of a DGSE file on Al-Qaeda leaked to the paper which it said was practically all of the French intelligence dossier on the network for the period between July 2000 and October 2001.
The DGSE document said the plotters, who began working on the hijack plan in 2000, considered seven airlines, including American and United Airlines, which had planes hijacked on September 11.
Le Monde on Monday published a lengthy article on the affair, written by Guillaume Dasquie, the author of two books on Al-Qaeda, who acquired the documents from DGSE sources.
The 328-page Al-Qaeda dossier consisted of notes, maps, graphics, and satellite photos gathered between July 2000 and October 2001.
The documents reveal that the DGSE had in 1995 set up a cell to watch bin Laden and already had considerable knowledge of the organisation and Al-Qaeda's financing.
04/16/2007 14:00 GMT