November 15, 2002, The Scotsman, US ready to execute Muslim for murder of CIA officers, by Tim Cornwell,

November 15, 2002, The Scotsman, US ready to execute Muslim for murder of CIA officers, by Tim Cornwell,

THE US last night was poised to execute a Pakistani Muslim accused of shooting to death two CIA employees in 1993.

Mir Aimal Kansi was scheduled to die by lethal injection in Virginia at 9pm local time, though his mother had lodged a final plea for clemency with the state's governor.

The US state department warned Americans last week the execution could trigger retaliatory attacks on US interests overseas. In Pakistan yesterday demonstrators burned the US flag and called for a strike in Kansi's hometown.

If executed, Kansi would be one of the first Muslim militants to be put to death in the US "war on terror", though his crimes were committed long before Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network became household names.

Ramsi Youssef, the blind cleric considered the mastermind of the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, in which a truck bomb killed six people, is serving a life sentence.

Other alleged terrorists - notably Zacarias Moussaoui, the accused 11 September plotter and so-called "20th hijacker" - face potential death sentences but their cases have yet to work their way through the courts.

While the US was braced for retaliatory attacks, after bin Laden himself apparently surfaced this week to issue tape-recorded threats, US officials yesterday played down reports that it feared bomb or anthrax attacks on hospitals.

An FBI agent in Houston, Texas had told reporters of "uncorroborated information" of possible attacks on hospitals in Houston, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco. But a White House spokesman McClellan, yesterday said the threat had "very low credibility".

Kansi's killings in January 1993 near the CIA headquarters stunned a country that had yet to experience a major incident of domestic terror.

Kansi, 38, was convicted of killing CIA communications worker Frank Darling, 28, and CIA analyst and physician Lansing Bennett, 66, as they sat in their cars at a traffic light outside the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Three other men were wounded.

Kansi flew to Pakistan the day after the killings and was not found for four years. US authorities say he spent most of that time in Afghanistan, hiding in Kandahar .

Kansi's home province of Baluchistan borders Afghanistan and is a stronghold of hardline Islamic groups. About 150 members of his tribe marched through the streets of the city of Quetta, yesterday.

A tribal elder Ibrahim Kansi told demonstrators: "His action was a reaction to what was happening to Muslims in Chechnya and Palestine."

The family of Judy Becker-Darling, widow of Frank Darling, said: "We will spend time in prayer for Kansi, that God will have mercy on his soul, for his family, and that there be no terrorism reprisal."

Police on the western outskirts of Paris yesterday arrested the head of a mosque and two associates accused in a terrorist conspiracy.

The mosque's imam, who is of Moroccan origin, incited militants to carry out terror strikes, judicial sources said.

In Manila, in the Philippines, yesterday, police said they had captured the leader of Abu Sayyaf, a militant group tied to al- Qaeda, which planned to plant truck bombs outside the Manila stock exchange, shopping malls, and foreign embassies.

Abdulmukim Edris, an alleged explosives chief with Abu Sayyaf, confessed that the group had planned to use mobile telephones to detonate the ammonium nitrate bombs, it was claimed.