Posted on 08/04/2004 8:13:05 AM PDT by Straight Vermonter
- Ahmed Khalifan Ghailani, a/k/a "Foopie," is a diminutive Tanzanian with an Uzbeki wife, six children and a deep hatred of America and Western culture in general.
A devout Muslim who plays a mean game of soccer but never learned to drive a car, Ghailani is also believed to be a key al Qaeda player who U.S. agents think is involved in a percolating terror plot aimed at disrupting America's upcoming elections.
He had a $25 million price on his head as the FBI's No. 7 most-wanted terrorist - the same amount as the bounty for the capture of Osama bin Laden or his top aide.
Ghailani has been on the lam since the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, which he helped orchestrate, according to a New York federal indictment against him. More than 210 people died in those attacks, including 12 Americans.
After an eight-hour gunfight in a Pakistani town July 25, Ghailani, his wife, two South African men and a handful of other Islamic extremists were taken into custody by Pakistani forces.
Although it has been overshadowed this week as U.S. officials issued an alert that terrorists may be plotting to attack financial targets in New York City, New Jersey and Washington, Ghailani's capture is a major break in the war on terror, security experts and Bush administration leaders say.
Pakistan's interior minister said Tuesday that information gleaned from his arrest has led them to at least one other "most-wanted" terrorist, although minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat did not disclose the name.
The seizure of Ghailani stemmed from the arrest July 13 of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer geek who allegedly served as a messenger between top echelon al Qaeda operatives, perhaps including bin Laden himself.
From Khan, the trail led to Mussad Arochi, a/k/a "Baluchi," who was arrested later in July in Pakistan in possession of what agents say appeared to be reconnaissance information. The arrest of Arochi - who is a cousin of the key planner of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and nephew of an orchestrator of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - led in turn to Ghailani.
The elusive Tanzanian, caught after six years underground after the Africa embassy bombings, is a man about whom little is definitively known.
An FBI "most-wanted" directive says he may have been born on a variety of dates in 1970 and 1974, and has used at least 19 aliases. When arrested, he had several forged passports with assorted birth dates and names. Along with "Foopie," or sometimes, "Fupi," Ghailani also has been known as "Ahmed the Tanzanian."
A low-key man who stands no more than 5-foot-3, Ghailani left his home on the island of Zanzibar in 1998, telling his family he had gotten a scholarship for Islamic studies, though he didn't say where.
"He was a quiet boy and religious, so he is not capable of hurting people," his mother told reporters last week in Zanzibar. Ghailani was the second of her nine children, she said.
Ghailani, who now has six children by his devout Islamic wife from Uzbekistan, is believed to have attended Taliban terror training camps in Afghanistan. He became a missionary preaching hatred of Western culture in mosques. Later, he devoted himself to helping craft the twin U.S. embassy bombings.
According to the 1998 federal indictment, Ghailani was in charge of buying the truck used to bomb the embassy in Tanzania, as well as the materials to construct the bomb, the detonator and the tanks of oxygen and acetylene that made the blast even more deadly. He fled to Karachi, Pakistan, the day before the attack.
Since then, Ghailani, who is fluent in English and Swahili, is believed to have lived in Afghanistan and later in several Pakistani cities. British newspapers have reported that he and another African-embassy-bombing suspect set up shop in Liberia where they traded diamonds for cash in a 2001 terror-financing scheme.
The Observer newspaper said the men got in hot water after reports reached al Qaeda's top echelon that Ghailani and cohort Fazul Abdullah Mohammed had been spending a lot of money on women and alcohol.
It is unclear what Ghailani did next, but Pakistani officials say he and his family are believed to have slipped into the small eastern Pakistan city of Gurjat a few months ago, where they rarely left their home.
Hosted by an underground network of Islamic extremists, Ghailani may have been planning part of a large-scale attack that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller warned the nation about in May. They issued a plea for the public to help them capture Ghailani and six other suspected accomplices.
U.S. and Pakistani authorities believe Ghailani went to Gurjat, a town known as a counterfeit-documents center, in part to assemble papers that would allow him and others to travel without notice.
A local who ran errands for Ghailani told police about the foreigners, which set in motion an eight-hour gun battle that ended only when Ghailani and those with him ran out of ammunition, Pakistani authorities told reporters.
Seized along with the suspects were weapons, chemicals, forged travel papers, foreign cash and a computer on which had been downloaded a plan for a U.S. attack.
Pakistani officials, who predicted more arrests to come based on information gleaned from the Ghailani capture, said he remained Tuesday in their custody.
Thank God they caught this guy. Hope he leads to more.
I have looked high and low through the posts to try to find if this story has been posted, I haven't found it, but I will post it here. A big bust in England of Al Qaeda operatives. http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004360489,00.html Men arrested across the nation.
WOW!
And to think that Kerry and company think the raised alert was based on "old information" and purely political. I expect to see Kerry drop more in the polls from another miscalculation.
Found that on the way to page 3? J/K
When the Dims claim we're not safer, we can counterclaim with a list of Al Qaida operatives killed and captured as well as a list of terrorist-supporting countries now on our side (Pakistan, Aghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia). Plus Libya's WMD surrender.
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Its truely scarey that a presidential canditate can concoct an excuse like "old information" as a reason for not acting on a threat. We're in deep trouble if Bush is not re-elected.
Lol, No, not quite, and if the Sun is racy, how about Germany's Bild. I wonder at times, if these papers should be used as sources but concerning some issues, they do well. For example, if one does like soccer-football, Bild is good for keeping up with Germany's National Team. The Bild is probably to racy in general to ever use. The sun, well, they bill themselves as the biggest paper in England. I think, i have seen them used on Drudge as well. Surely, I could have found the story from another source though.
So now there are three arrests linked to this intelligence dissed by Kerrie' and the Rats as "old and unreliable" and these are high on the food chain terrorists, too. Apparently, they still believe they are able to enter and exit the US on the sly, and that is worrysome, DemoRat border control still in place.
Still, this is good news, the US and HER ALLIES are making progress in the WOT. Too bad to win against the terrorists America must win against the DemoRats as well. One would have hoped they would be on OUR side.
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