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http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/44708.htm 'DIRTY BOMBER' HUNT
By NILES LATHEM
January 10, 2004 -- EXCLUSIVE
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies have launched a worldwide manhunt for al Qaeda's master bombmaker, who may be building a "dirty" bomb and other new devices for terror attacks inside the United States, sources said.
U.S. counterterrorism officials told The Post it was new information about the activities of Egyptian-born bomb maker Midhat Mursi, in part, that led the Bush administration to secretly dispatch Department of Energy radiological detection teams to New York and four other cities over New Year's Eve.
Before the Bush administration decided to raise the nationwide alert level to Code Orange, an al Qaeda informant had said that Mursi, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Khabab, was active again, intelligence officials told The Post.
Intelligence officials said Mursi is a chemical engineer who was head of al Qaeda's weapons-of-mass-destruction committee and reported directly to al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
He is believed to have gone underground before or during the 2001 Afghanistan war and is considered the most wanted al Qaeda figure after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Before the Afghan war, Mursi operated crude laboratories at an al Qaeda complex near Jalalabad, where satellite imagery showed scores of dead animals outside, victims of ghoulish experiments with anthrax and other biological and chemical poisons, U.S. officials said.
Sources said documents found at the camp and at al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan also included what one intelligence official called "very innovative designs for explosive devices" - some designed to be carried aboard airplanes without being detected.
Some documents indicated Mursi was exchanging information with Palestinian and Hezbollah bomb makers - including some who helped design the shoe bomb carried aboard a Paris-to-Boston flight by Richard Reid in 2001, sources said.