Author: Subway gas attack planned

NEW YORK, June 17 (UPI) -- Al-Qaida planned a poison gas attack in the New York subway system, a new book says.

An excerpt from "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind is to appear in the upcoming issue of Time magazine. Suskind is also the author of "The Price of Loyalty," written with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

In his book, Suskind says U.S. intelligence learned from a captured laptop computer that al-Qaida had developed a device that would quickly spread a gas similar to Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi death camps.

The plans showed a two-chambered device. One side would hold sodium chloride and the other hydro cyanide, which would produce hydrogen chloride gas if the seal between the two was broken.

The plot was allegedly set to take place just before the invasion of Iraq, but Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's No. 2 man, vetoed it.