Russell Defreitas, one of the four men indicted on charges of conspiracy to blow up the JFK International Airport in 2007, told investigators when he was arrested that he was the “brain of everything”; the plan was “to blow up the tanks” and the intention was to hurt the US economy.
According to a Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) report on the conversation investigators had with Defreitas when he was arrested in New York in June of 2007, and made public through court filings on Tuesday, while Defreitas had initially indicated that others were merely “picking his brain” for ideas when they first approached him about the plot, he later told investigators that in fact it was all his plan.
Defreitas, a former JFK airport employee and US citizen, was born in Guyana. He and Abdul Kadir, a former PNC parliamentarian; Kareem Ibrahim, an imam from Trinidad and Guyanese Abdel Nur have been charged with conspiring to blow up JFK airport, tanks storing aviation fuel and underground fuel pipelines in 2007.
Defreitas’s lawyer Mildred Whalen is seeking to suppress the statements along with evidence seized from his backpack on the day of his arrest. According to the documents, he initially told investigators that he was not involved in the plan other than having his brain picked for information and that individuals who approached him at mosques in Guyana and the US were just using his knowledge of the airport. He said they knew he had been an employee at the airport because of an incident he was involved in several years ago when the authorities found drugs in his suitcase.
But investigators informed the accused that they knew about his surveillance of the airport and told him that they had been watching him each of the four times he and the informant went to the airport to conduct surveillance.
“Defreitas sat silent with his head down for several minutes” after he was informed of the damning evidence, the report said.
After a break he changed his story and said he was involved with the plan and that they had come up with a code word for the plan- ‘Shining Light’ – in reference to the JFK airport.
The report said that after being shown a photograph of Kadir and others, Defreitas said he had met the former parliamentarian at a mosque in Guyana, but had never shown him the surveillance video of JFK nor discussed the plot with him.
He claimed that when he and the informant went to Linden they met with Kadir’s son and not the parliamentarian.
And while he also said he did not show anyone the surveillance video during a trip to Trinidad he was confronted with an audio recording on which he was heard instructing the informant to play the video and then he narrated it for Kareem Ibrahim.
He was asked again if he had showed the video to anyone in Trinidad and in Guyana and replied that he thought he should have a lawyer present for any further questions. He said he understood his Miranda rights which were read to him at the beginning of the interview and when asked why he thought he needed a lawyer at that time when he did not ask for one at the beginning of the interview he replied:
“I did not realise you had so much evidence,” and the interview was terminated.
As he was being led out of the interview room he told the investigators, “You guys are the best.”
The three other accused are seeking to have their case tried separately from Defreitas but this is being opposed by the prosecutors who pointed out that all four are charged with the same offence.
