MANILA, 26 July 2003 — The third highest ranking official of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network has admitted to US authorities that he plotted in Manila the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, CNN reported last night.

CNN said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested overseas earlier this year, admitted during interrogation that he and his nephew Ramzi Yousef planned in 1994 the Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

That same year, CNN reported, the two “admitted” slipping 14 bottles containing liquid explosives into the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. They said they used plastic bottles of contact lens solutions as containers, according to the international news network.

Mohammed supposedly concealed a metal detonator between his toes and carried other pieces of metal and jewelry to confuse airport authorities.

“He said he and Yousef placed condoms in their bags to support their cover story that they were traveling to meet women,” CNN said.

In December 1994, Yousef actually planted and set off a bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight, CNN said.

“They were sent to carry out an audacious plot to bomb 11 US airlines over the Pacific, which the FBI estimates could have killed 4,000 people,” it said, adding that the plan was aborted after the two men’s safe house — a unit in an apartment building on Manila’s Quirino Highway — accidentally caught fire.

Mohammed has been charged in the 1995 plot to bomb or hijack 11 US-bound flights coming from Asian countries, including the Philippines. Yousef was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

CNN said Senior Superintendent Rodolfo “Boogie” Mendoza, a former intelligence official and now police commander of Pangasinan province, discovered the “blueprint” for the 9/11 attacks when he interrogated in Manila Abdul Hakim Murad, supposedly a former classmate of Yousef’s.

US officials have said that Murad — a Pakistani arrested in Manila in 1995 for allegedly plotting to kill Pope John Paul II and conspiring in the plot to bomb or hijack US-bound planes-took flight courses in the United States.

“They had a plan to crash the airplane, the commercial jetliner, into the specific target, and they have done it,” Mendoza said in the CNN interview.

Besides the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed supposedly admitted plotting in Manila to kill then US President Bill Clinton and to bomb nuclear plants in the United States.

“Mohammed said the 1995 operation was his first for Al-Qaeda,” CNN said. “Through the years as he rose up the ranks, he passed along the lessons he learned to the operatives he controlled.”