December 17, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 1, 1422

LONDON, Dec 16: Plans for a major bomb attack on London have been discovered in a terrorist base in Afghanistan, British newspapers claimed on Sunday.

The Observer said it had seen the blueprint for an attack in a notebook discovered at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Kandahar.

A note suggested that the intended target was Moorgate in the centre of London’s financial district.

But there was no indication whether the person who drew up the plan stayed to fight and die with alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, or whether he had already left on his mission to Britain before the suicide hijackings of Sept 11, the Observer said.

A Scotland Yard source told the newspaper that the discovery in Kandahar would be investigated by anti-terrorist officials. Written in clear English, the language suggested that the author was a British fundamentalist who prepared the document while training at the camp in the Sheragha Jama district of Kandahar, the newspaper added.

The Independent on Sunday said it had seen detailed notes found in a Kandahar “safe house” for an al-Qaeda plan to explode a huge car bomb in the Moorgate area, to be detonated by remote control.—dpa