“The Justice Department announced today [June 10, 2002] that they had broken up a plot by Al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive bomb inside the United States with the arrest of a Brooklyn-born American citizen in the case. ‘We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or *dirty bomb,* in the United States,’ Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a televised announcement… Mr. Ashcroft identified the suspect as Abdullah al-Muhajir, 31, a former Chicago gang member who American officials said was born Jose Padilla and raised as a Roman Catholic but who later converted to Islam and changed his name.”
– James Risen and Philip Shenon, “U.S. Says it Halted Qaeda Plot to Use Radioactive Bomb,” The New York Times, June 10, 2002