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Saajid Badat, jailed over a plot to blow up a plane, has told a US terror trial about his 'direct interaction' with the late al-Qaida leader
A British man convicted in an aborted shoe-bombing mission has admitted meeting Osama bin Laden, in testimony recorded for a US terror trial.
Saajid Badat, 33, was interviewed by US prosecutors outside London last month in preparation for the trial of Adis Medunjanin, who is accused of the plot to attack New York's subways in 2009.
British authorities said this week that Badat would be the first person convicted in the UK on terrorism charges to agree to give evidence at the trial of alleged terrorists.
Badat said he refused a request to testify in person because he remains under indictment in Boston on charges alleging he conspired with the shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
"If I go to the United States, I'll be arrested," Badat said on the tape played for a federal court jury in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Badat pleaded guilty in Britain to plotting with Reid to bring down separate American transatlantic flights using bombs hidden in their shoes. Unlike Reid, he backed out at the last minute.
"I agreed to take an explosive on an aircraft and explode it," he said in the video, looking clean-cut and wearing a suit.
He testified that he had "direct interaction" with Bin Laden more than once after travelling to Afghanistan in 1999. At the time, he knew the terror network as "The Sheik's Group", with "sheik" referring to Bin Laden.
Medunjanin is accused of travelling to Pakistan with two friends from his Queens secondary school in 2008 and receiving terrorism training from al-Qaida.
Prosecutors allege the men agreed to seek martyrdom by dying as suicide bombers in an attack on Manhattan subway lines at rush hour.
Medunjanin, 27, a Bosnian-born US citizen, has pleaded not guilty and denied he was ever part of an al-Qaida operation.
Badat, the British-born son of Malawi immigrants, was 21 when he travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While in Afghanistan, he was given an explosive device designed to evade airport security and destroy an aircraft in flight, authorities said.
Badat returned to Britain with the device on 10 December 2001. He stashed the bomb under a bed in his family home in Gloucester, England, and resumed his academic studies. He later told authorities he backed out because he was hoping "to introduce calm into his life".
British intelligence tracked down Badat two years later and arrested him after investigators matched cords on Reid's device to those on Badat's bomb.
Badat was sentenced to 13 years in prison. But authorities announced this week that in 2009 a judge secretly reduced his sentence to 11 years to reward him for his co-operation in terror investigations.
Reid attempted to bring down a plane in December 2001 and is serving a life sentence in a high-security US prison.
The majority of Badat's evidence will be heard when the trial resumes on Monday.