Feb 1 2003
The Western Mail - The National Newspaper Of Wales
THE story of how an ex-Swansea student's identity was stolen could help provide evidence of a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, it was claimed last night. After years of painstaking re-search, former Bill Clinton defence adviser Laurie Mylroie claims Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the New York World Trade Centre in 1993, was an Iraqi agent.
Mylroie, who advised Bill Clinton on Iraq during his 1992 presidential campaign, is convinced that Yousef stole the identity papers of Abdul Basit, who studied computer-aided engineering at Swansea Institute of Higher Education in the 1980s. Yousef was sentenced to 240 years for terrorism plots and the 1993 attack which severely damaged the World Trade Centre's underground car park and killed six people.
Mylroie, whose book The War Against America details her belief that Iraq and Al-Qaeda are inextricably linked, is pleased that President Bush is now connecting Iraq with the September 11 attacks.
She said, "Al-Qaeda acts as a front for Iraqi intelligence. Al-Qaeda provides the ideology, the foot soldiers and the cover, and Iraqi intelligence provides the direction, training and expertise."
To confirm her suspicions that Yousef had stolen Abdul Basit's identity, she travelled to Swansea to speak to institute lecturers who had taught him. She said, "The crucial factor in deciding that Basit and Yousef were two separate people was their height. His teachers put Basit at about 5ft 8ins tall while Yousef was a six footer. The two lecturers with whom I met had a very clear memory of Abdul Basit.
"They described him as quiet and not quite the person who would run up $18,000 in unpaid telephone bills as Yousef had. He was also not the sort of person to play a leading role in organising others in two major bombing plots (the first World Trade Centre attack and a plan to blow up 12 US airliners).
"Abdul Basit's teachers also said they observed no strong political or religious views in the student. He went to the Swansea Mosque on Fridays but was not considered an extremist."
Mylroie says her research has shown that Basit was one of a number of Kuwaiti students murdered when Iraq invaded their country in 1990. Their passports and belongings were stolen and later used to provide Iraqi agents with false identities, she claims.
It is thought Yousef was even given text books Abdul Basit had loaned and not returned from Swansea Library to complete his cover. When finally arrested in Pakistan after fleeing the US, the library books were discovered in his hotel room along with maps and guns.
Mylroie says the capture of Abdul Basit's identity and the subsequent attack on the World Trade Centre was a precursor to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Mylroie says at Salman Pak, a short distance from Bagdhad, US intelligence planes have taken photographs of a parked Boeing 707.
She says Iraqi defectors and captured Al-Qaeda agents have said this plane has been used by terrorists for "familiarisation" with western airliners in preparation for attacks and hijacks.
Mylroie is not the only American defence expert to have concerns about the links between Ramzi Yousef and Iraq. Last year, Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish US deputy defence secretary, sent James Woolsey, a former CIA director, to Swansea to search for information about Abdul Basit and Ramzi Yousef. source