U.S. Embassy Bombings Suspect Arrested

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan has arrested a Tanzanian Al Qaeda (search) suspect wanted by the United States in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the interior minister said Friday. He said the suspect was cooperating and had given authorities "very valuable" information.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (search) — who is on the FBI's list of 22 most wanted terrorists, with a reward of up to $25 million on his head — was arrested Sunday in the eastern city of Gujrat along with at least 15 other people, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told The Associated Press.

He said Ghailani has given authorities some useful information. Hayyat would not speculate on whether the suspect was planning any attacks in the United States or Pakistan.

"It would be premature to say anything about this, but obviously we have certain information, some very valuable and useful leads have been acquired," he said.

A U.S. official confirmed the capture of Ghailani and said it is a significant development because he is an Al Qaeda operative and facilitator who has been indicted for his role in the east Africa bombings.

Ghailani may be able to shed further light on the 1998 embassy bombings or have information about terror cells or Al Qaeda operatives, particularly in east Africa, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Mohammed Sadiq Odeh (search), who was convicted in the African embassy bombings, told the FBI that he joined the rest of the East Africa Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi on Aug. 6, 1998 and flew to Karachi on a Kenyan Airways flight before the bombs even exploded, according to a court transcript. That was the last known sighting of Ghailani until his arrest six years later.

Hayyat said Ghailani had apparently been living in Pakistan for some time, but it was not clear how long, or how he entered the country. Gujrat is an industrial city surrounded by rice and sugar cane fields, not known as a haven for militancy or extremism.

"This is a big success," Hayyat told Pakistan's Geo television network. "As a result of our investigation, it became clear that he was a major figure wanted for the bombings," Hayyat said.

Hayyat said Ghailani was being held at an undisclosed location in Pakistan, but indicated he might be turned over to U.S. authorities after investigations are completed. An intelligence official told The Associated Press he was being held at a facility in the eastern city of Lahore.

Ghailani, thought to be in his early 30s, was indicted on Dec. 16, 1998 in the Southern District of New York for his alleged role in the embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans.

He is suspected of buying the truck used as the vehicle bomb in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in which 12 people were killed.

I do not think that it was just these two groups, there are probably more. I guess that the coming days all travellers with passport from SA will be checked more carefully.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=123&art_id=qw1091180341281T614

Vienna - They're just little embossed rectangles in burgundy, forest green or navy blue, but they can lay a nation bare to a terrorist plot.

Passports - not box cutters or even jetliners - may be al-Qaeda's most powerful weapons. Stolen and legitimate, doctored and untouched, they have enabled Osama bin Laden's network and other terror groups to plan and carry out attacks worldwide.

In its final report, the United States commission investigating the September 11 attacks touts high-tech biometric passports, still in the developmental stage, and better border guard training as key ways to tighten the United States' defenses.

But anti-terrorism experts, mindful of the ingenuity demonstrated by Islamic militants, told The Associated Press they feel humbled and helpless.

"One of the hidden criticisms (in the report) is that not only were we not prepared on September 11, but the measures we've taken from September 11 to today have not improved the matter that much," said Michael Greenberger, who was a Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.

"Our databases are a mess. Change a person's middle initial and he doesn't show up," said Greenberger, who now directs the University of Maryland's Centre for Health and Homeland Security. "By and large, we've not been terribly successful."

The commission offers no argument.

"No one can hide his or her debt by acquiring a credit card with a slightly different name," said its report, released last week. "Yet today, a terrorist can defeat the link to electronic records by tossing away an old passport and slightly altering the name in the new one."

Conceding it has only "fragmentary" evidence of the travels of the September11 organizers and hijackers, the commission's 567-page report nonetheless is packed with detailed accounts of how the terrorists obtained and modified the passports that got them into the United States.

"We've got to adopt the technology and get away from purely paper documents"
A key panel recommendation points up the seriousness of the threat:

"Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility."

That, experts say, is far easier said than done.

"If you have someone who is determined to evade immigration controls, they'll do it - or at least they'll have a good chance," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest. "I don't see any evidence to suggest that we've had any success in making (al-Qaeda) any less of a threat."

Al-Qaeda once brazenly operated its own passport office at the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the group "altered papers, including passports, visas and identification cards" before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the commission notes.

Although the US-led war in Afghanistan ended such Taliban-protected operations, there are plenty of terrorists worldwide who are skilled in doctoring documents, the panel warns. It says al-Qaeda and others have refined half a dozen simple yet highly effective techniques.

Among the most popular is obtaining stolen passports, which authorities say are available on a lucrative black market that stretches from eastern Europe to Southeast Asia and South Africa.

There are up to 10 million lost or stolen passports in circulation worldwide, according to Interpol estimates.

"You can find all sorts of fake passports in the Balkans, including stolen or fake American" documents, a former high-ranking police official in Serbia told AP on condition of anonymity.

Experts say they're being sold for as little as $75, although US. passports can fetch $3000 or more.

Al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists intercepted in Europe had obtained South African passports they apparently got from crime syndicates operating within the government agency that issues the documents, officials disclosed to AP last week.

Another commonly used technique involves adding or removing visa cachets and entry and exit stamps. By doing so, experts say, terrorists can delete any evidence of their travel to suspicious destinations such as Afghanistan or Pakistan. They also can create false trails to throw authorities off track.

Two of the September11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, apparently flew to Bangkok because "they thought it would enhance their cover as tourists to have passport stamps from a popular tourist destination such as Thailand," the commission says.

Some simply would turn in passports filled with suspicion-arousing visas and stamps from countries where al-Qaeda operated - even if the documents were still valid for another year - and get new, clean ones. Fourteen of the 19 suicide hijackers, exhorted by September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, obtained new passports.

Others work to acquire as many passports as possible, reasoning that a Canadian or Belgian passport is less likely to prompt scrutiny from US border guards than one from Saudi Arabia.

In one case cited by the commission, convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam obtained a blank baptismal certificate that a document vendor had stolen from a Roman Catholic church in Montreal, and used it to get a genuine Canadian passport.

Saudi hijackers had a problem: If they traveled to Afghanistan via Pakistan, and the Pakistanis stamped their passports, they risked having them confiscated back in Saudi Arabia.

"So operatives either erased the Pakistani visas from their passports or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports," the commission says. Tehran has angrily denied any complicity in the September11 attacks, even though the panel contends up to 10 of the hijackers passed through Iran en route to the United States.

Al-Qaida operative Tawfiq bin Attash indicated that Malaysia repeatedly was used as a place to plot attacks "because its government did not require citizens of Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states to have a visa." Bin Attash, better known as Khallad, helped bomb the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, killing 17 American sailors,

Greenberger is among many pushing for the swift consolidation of travel databases "so these names start popping up." He and others also are pressing for the introduction of supposedly tamperproof biometric passports that will contain digital photographs and fingerprints.

The European Union agreed in March to fast-track the inclusion of biometric data in passports by the end of 2006. Belgium has vowed to be among the first by introducing its new travel documents next year, and Austria, Denmark and Slovenia have developed working prototypes.

"Nothing is going to be foolproof, but by altering the technology, I think it's possible to raise our defences," he said. "The harder we make it to forge documents, the greater our gains in protecting the borders. You're really upping the ante."

But Standish, of Janes' Intelligence Digest, is sceptical.

"The basic problem is that if a document of any kind can be produced, it can be falsified or forged," he said.

"As an IRA terrorist once famously said to the authorities: 'You have to be lucky all the time. I only have to be lucky once.'" - Sapa-AP

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