Long Island man confesses to giving Al Qaeda information about New York subways, LIRR trains

New York, July 23 (ANI): A Long Island man has confessed to feeding Al Qaeda information about New York's subways and LIRR trains, which triggered last year's Thanksgiving Eve terror alert.

According to federal agents, Bryant Neal Vinas, 26, the son of South American immigrants and a convert to Islam, was captured in November in Pakistan after he joined in a rocket attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

A New York Daily News report, quoting sources, says that he confessed his treason almost immediately and began cooperating, offering information of potentially great value because he had met with high-level operational leaders.

Vinas is one of a handful of Americans charged with joining the terror network that took down the World Trade Center and has sworn to destroy America. A former truck driver who grew up Catholic in Patchogue, he converted to radical Islam and became a fighter known variously as "Ibrahim" or "Bashir el Ameriki" - Bashir the American.

His capture - and the information he spilled - prompted Homeland Security Department officials to issue an urgent November 25 alert about a "plausible but unsubstantiated" threat of a suicide attack on Long Island Rail Road trains in Penn Station.

Cops flooded the busy transit hub during the Thanksgiving exodus, which proved uneventful.

Vinas pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court in January to participating in a rocket attack against U.S. troops in Afghanistan last year; providing details of New York's transit system to Al Qaeda, and receiving five months of military training at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp.

His identity and his very existence had been kept secret as he helps build cases against extremists here and overseas. Vinas, who is in custody in New York, is set to testify soon in a terror case in Belgium. (ANI)