Al-Qaeda 'rejected offer to detonate nuclear bomb'

A FORMER Chicago gang member proposed detonating an improvised nuclear bomb in the United States, but al-Qaeda’s leaders were sceptical he could do it and sent him on a mission to blow up apartment buildings instead, the US Justice Department said yesterday.

The department released the newly declassified information on Jose Padilla at a time when the US supreme court is preparing to rule on whether he and other American citizens can be held indefinitely in US military jails without the protection of the American legal system.

Padilla is a former Chicago gang member and convert to Islam. He has not been charged with any crime but has been held in a military prison in South Carolina for two years.

The deputy attorney general, James Comey, rejected suggestions that the Padilla information was released because of criticism of the attorney general, John Ashcroft, for last week’s vague warning that al-Qaeda plans an attack against the US in the next few months.