One year on from the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, al-Qaeda has revealed both a technological sophistication and a morbid creativity that nearly flummoxed intelligence officials across the West, from Germany to the United States.
This week, documents obtained by CNN showed that pornographic videos seized from an Austrian terror suspect, called Maqsood Lodin, who was questioned by the police in Berlin last year, were cracked open by cryptologists to expose plans for international terror attacks planned by al-Qaeda, many of them following the shooting-spree style of Mumbai 2008.
According to reports, more than 100 al-Qaeda documents, including “an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations,” were found within several pornographic videos hidden in Lodin's underpants, contained in a digital storage device and memory cards.
U.S. intelligence sources reportedly told CNN that the documents uncovered were “pure gold,” with one official confirming that it was “the most important haul of al-Qaeda materials in the last year, besides those found when U.S. Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden's compound.”
