Al-Qaeda calls for terror attack on crowded Washington restaurant at lunch hour

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda has called on American jihadis to carry out a terror attack on a crowded restaurant in Washington to massacre US government workers.

The terror threat was unearthed from the second edition of Al-Qaeda’s English-language magazine ‘Inspire’.

“A random hit at a crowded restaurant in Washington, D.C., at lunch hour might end up knocking out a few government employees,” the New York Daily News quoted Yahya Ibrahim, as having written in the 74-page propaganda magazine.

“Targeting such employees is paramount and the location would also give the operation additional media attention,” he added.

According to a copy of the magazine obtained by the SITE intelligence group, Al-Qaeda also urged those bent on murdering for Islam to use everything from pickup trucks to improvised pressure-cooker bombs to kill.

The trucks can be fashioned into “the ultimate mowing machine”, with steel blades welded to the grill to “mow down the enemies of Allah” by running down Americans on crowded sidewalks “to achieve maximum carnage” in a “martyrdom operation”.

“This method has not been used before,” advises Al-Qaeda in its “Tips for our brothers in the U.S.”

The 74 pages long magazine also features “exclusive” comments by radical cleric Anwar Awlaki on “The Mardin Declaration”, a condemnation of terrorism issued in March by Muslim scholars meeting in the Turkish city of Mardin.

Awlaki, who is now hiding in Yemen and has been tied to the Fort Hood shootings and the failed Christmas Day plot, has called the declaration a “disgrace” and “not worth the ink and the paper it’s written on”.

The first edition included articles by Osama bin Laden and Awlaki. It encouraged the Western readers to “conduct attacks in the West and to join the ‘jihad’.

Highlighting the threat due to the magazine, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had earlier said: “DHS and the FBI are concerned … that the sophisticated, colloquial English-language magazine could appeal to certain Western individuals and inspire them to conduct attacks in the United States in the future”. (ANI)