Prosecutors: 4th Man Recruited in NYC Bomb Plot

Federal prosecutors have quietly added a new wrinkle to their case against a New York City man charged in one of the most serious terror plots since the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a revised indictment filed last week in Brooklyn, Adis Medunjanin was hit with a new allegation that he — along with former high school classmates Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay — tried to recruit someone identified only as John Doe to travel to Pakistan “to wage violent jihad.”

It was the first time the government has linked a fourth person in the U.S. to what evolved into an al-Qaida-sanctioned scheme to pull off what prosecutors call three “coordinated suicide bombing attacks” on Manhattan subway lines. Lawyers for Medunjanin are now demanding that the government reveal the identity of the man before he turns up as a possible witness at a trial set for March.

A pretrial hearing is scheduled next week to take up the issue. The defense also plans to oppose a request by prosecutors for an anonymous jury, Gottlieb said.

Prosecutors allege that Medunjanin, Zazi and Ahmedzay tried to recruit the fourth man before the three went to Afghanistan in 2008 to join the Taliban and fight U.S. soldiers. They instead were recruited by al-Qaida operatives, who gave them weapons training in their Pakistan camp and asked them to become suicide bombers, authorities say.

The new indictment doesn’t say what became of the fourth man.