WASHINGTON: The Obama administration is conducting an intense security review as part of a plan to bring one of the world’s most notorious terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay to Washington for a trial, officials said.

Republican critics said the plan would make the city more dangerous, risk compromising US intelligence methods and provide a powerful and expensive bullhorn for Osama bin Laden’s alleged lieutenant, Riduan Isamuddin, and two associates. Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, is believed to be the main link between al-Qaida and Jemaah Islami, the terror group blamed for the 2002 bombing at a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people.

“Such a plan is unacceptable and I will vehemently oppose it,” Rep Frank R Wolf, a Republican, wrote yesterday in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Wolf cited what he said were classified briefings

he received about terror threats to the US.

“If the American people knew these threats, they would never tolerate the transfer of these detainees to major urban population centres for trial,” he wrote.

The plan under review at the Justice Department

was described by multiple US officials who spoke on

condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss private planning meetings. The officials said a decision could come in a matter of weeks.

Other trials may also occur in Washington and New York, meaning the most significant terrorism trials in generations would be conducted in the two cities targeted in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

In his criticisms to the attorney general, Wolf said trials should be at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, or, alternatively, at what he described as remote, secure facilities far from any US population centres.

Following his capture in 2003, Hambali was among the terrorism suspects held for years in secret CIA prisons. US intelligence officials have publicly linked him to the attempted assassination of a Philippine ambassador and the coordinated Christmas Eve 2000 bombings of Indonesian churches.