Posted on 09/17/2001 8:27:51 PM PDT by Wallaby
Life: August 7, 1998, was the day Mohammed al'Owhali had chosen to die. His mission, to destroy the American embassy in Nairobi. By 11am, 213 people were killed and 4,600 were injured in a massive blast... but not al'Owhali. As the Saudi bomber begins his life sentence in a US jail, Jason Burke uncovers the secret FBI files on the suicide bomber who changed his mindJason Burke The Observer; Observer Life Pages, Pg. 20 August 5, 2001
Nairobi. Noon, 7 August 1998. A cool day and the distant ridge of the Ngong hills is pale against the washed-out sky, with a thin layer of cloud flat and hard over the city. Thick columns of boiling brown smoke are pluming from somewhere among the tower blocks in the centre.
At the roundabout where Haile Selassie and Moi Avenues meet, several buildings have ceased to exist. In their place is a heap of rubble, twisted metal debris, tangled wreckage, cars, wads of paper, computers, shredded clothes, broken glass, corpses and body parts. There are scores of ambulances ferrying the wounded and the dying to the city's hospitals. At Nairobi's main hospital, the blood is literally running down the walls. Ambulances are carrying the wounded out of the centre of the city to the private hospitals such as the MP Shah hospital in the wealthy suburb of Parklands. There, the first wave of wounded arrives at about 11.15am. Forty-five minutes later, the building is full of the dead and the dying. Though there are moans and subdued voices and stifled sobs and the muffled cries of very scared children, there is no screaming.
"To kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it..."
In the men's toilets on the ground floor, a slim-shouldered, 21-year-old from Saudi Arabia is standing in front of a basin. He is trying to wash his fingerprints off a set of keys and three bullets which he had found in his pockets five minutes earlier, when he was searching for some money to pay for a taxi. Having tried to wash them, he attempts to flush them down a cistern. When that fails, he fishes them out and stands there, wondering what to do.
The keys fit the lock on the rear doors of a light-brown Toyota pick-up truck. The bullets are from a gun he had left in the vehicle.
The gun no longer exists. Nor, in fact, does the truck. Eighty minutes earlier, it had been blown to pieces when the driver had pressed a detonator button taped to the underside of the dashboard. The driver, another young Saudi named Azzam, was effectively vapourised. In all, 4,600 people were injured, 213 died and the American embassy was destroyed, along with a nearby secretarial college and large parts of a big bank. The man who has his hands in the basin in the MP Shah hospital was supposed to die in the explosion, too. But he didn't. He ran away.
His name is Mohammed Rashid Daoud al'Owhali. He has spent the last week preparing for suicide and martyrdom. Now he is alone and in the middle of a hospital full of the casualties of a bomb that he delivered. If all has gone according to plan, a second suicide bomb has just destroyed the American embassy in neighbouring Tanzania. He is sure the law-enforcement agencies of the most powerful country in the world are already looking for him. He has no money and no passport. No one knows his real name. No one even knows he is alive.
Why did he do it? How did he get there? What does it feel like to bring, out of nothing, death and pain and violence into the lives of thousands of people?
Al'Owhali was born, oddly enough, in Liverpool, on 18 January 1977. His father, from a prominent and wealthy Saudi family, was in England doing a master's degree at the university. His son was too young when he left to remember his only fleeting experience of life in the West.
He was a normal child, if rather withdrawn, who, from his early teens, was powerfully attracted to orthodox Islam. His reading material included books with names such as The Love and Hour of the Martyrs
In addition to the Koran and the great works of Islam, he read about America and the West and particularly about the duty of all Muslims to resist any attempt to subjugate the nations of Islam. He was 10 at the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada, 14 during the Gulf War and, like many, felt the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after Operation Desert Storm to be an outrage and an insult. He was 15 and 16 during the fighting in Bosnia and the massacre of the Muslims there, 17 when the Americans intervened in Somalia. Every episode marked him, though there is no evidence of any abnormal behaviour. Al'Owhali might have been odd, but he wasn't mad.
After high school he spent two years at university in Riyadh, studying Islamic jurisprudence. In 1996, when he was 19, a friend returned from fighting in Bosnia and started him thinking about joining a jihad himself.
Again, if you are looking for reasons, there is little in this to explain subsequent events. Dreams of martial glory are hardly uncommon in 19-year-olds all over the world.
Al'Owhali first tried going to Turkestan, the Balkans or Chechnya, but he couldn't work out how to get there. Instead, he went to Peshawar, the dirty, violent, frontier city in northwest Pakistan. He was following a well- worn path and ended up in Khaldan camp, in the dry, craggy hills southwest of the city, just over the border into Afghanistan.
The camp was (and still is) an induction camp for volunteers from the Islamic world who want to fight - some for their beliefs, some for the excitement, some for the camaraderie and the sense of purpose. Within weeks, al'Owhali was proficient with light weapons, basic demolition techniques, some artillery, rudimentary tactics and tactical communications.
He was committed and able, and did well. After two months' training, like a star pupil at primary school, he won a prize: an audience with Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden is now an almost mythic figure. His lean, bearded face is as familiar to us as those of the Red Brigade and Carlos the Jackal were two decades ago. In a single week in June, news reports linked him with attacks or planned attacks in Canada, Jordan, the Yemen, India, Spain, France, Cyprus and the Philippines. According to George Tenet, the director of the CIA, bin Laden is 'the most immediate (global) threat to American security today'. His image is that of a James Bond villain, sitting in his hideaway in Afghanistan, orchestrating global terror by satellite phone and email, with a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. If he had cats, no doubt he'd sit in a black leather chair and stroke them.
Al'Owhali knew little about him. Bin Laden, who was 39 when the two met, had been expelled from his native Saudi Arabia in 1991 after criticising the royal rulers for allowing American troops into the country during the Gulf War. His expulsion, subsequent flight to Sudan and loss of Saudi citizenship had gained him relative celebrity among hardline Islamists in the Gulf. But since then, bin Laden's profile had been low.
Shortly before al'Owhali met him in late 1996, bin Laden had been ordered to leave the Sudan by the government in Khartoum. He chartered a plane and flew directly to Afghanistan - a country he, too, knew well. Sixteen years earlier, days after the Soviets invaded the country, he had made his way to Peshawar to offer his help and the resources of his hugely rich family in the fight against the Red Army. He was, then, about the same age as al'Owhali.
During the war, bin Laden ran an organisation which, with American support, recruited young Muslims from all over the world, trained them, armed them and sent them into battle. He created an 'International Brigade' of Islamists to fight the Soviets. Some experts say 30,000 men served in it. In so doing, he founded an international network of like-minded men that would be useful later on.
But, though al'Owhali hardly knew him before they met, the older man's message must have resonated strongly. Bin Laden told his young compatriot that he was needed to expel the US from the lands of Islam. Al'Owhali asked for a 'military mission' and, on finishing his training in Khaldan camp, was moved to camps run by al'Qaeda ('the base'), bin Laden's group. There he received more specialised instruction in terrorism.
While he waited for al'Qaeda to give him a mission, al'Owhali fought for the Taliban - the hardline Islamic militia fighting for control of Afghanistan. One particular engagement, known as the C-Formation battle, made al'Owhali something of a hero. The action took place on the plains north of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. The Taliban had attacked opposition forces massed northeast of the city, but had been beaten back. Al'Owhali and five others held off massively superior forces, giving their comrades time to retreat and regroup. His ability and loyalty were proved - at exactly the right time.
On 22 February 1998 a new fatwa was issued in the name of the 'World Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders'. It was signed by bin Laden and the heads of major Islamic movements in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It said:
'To kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the Holy Mosque (in Mecca) and to force their armies to withdraw from all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.'
The threat implicit in the call to arms was not an idle one.
Shortly before the fatwa was issued, al'Owhali had been contacted by an al'Qaeda aide, who asked if he was still interested in a mission. He was taken to another training camp outside Kabul and given advanced lessons in bomb-making, surveillance and security. Then he was handed a false Iraqi passport, told to shave his beard as a rudimentary disguise and ordered to go to the Yemen. There he stayed in San'a, the capital, with a comrade from the Taliban. He must have already known what his 'mission' was likely to entail because, for the first time in two years, he called his parents. On 18 May, he flew back to Pakistan, where he was briefed on his mission and recorded a video claiming the coming strike in the name of the 'First Squad of the El Bara bin Malik division of the Army of Liberating the Islamic Holy Lands'.
He said he was happy at the prospect of becoming a martyr. He was 21.
What makes a suicide bomber? The Israelis, unsurprisingly, are the leading experts in the field. An investigation by Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, found that almost all suicide bombers share certain characteristics. They are usually young (rarely more than 27 years old), unmarried and from a poor background, relatively educated, devout and often have expressed the desire to avenge the death or injury of a relative or close friend that they blamed on Israel.
Al'Olwahi fits much of the profile, but by no means all of it. Most obviously, he is from a wealthy background. Often the economic attractions of martyrdom for a bomber's family - the boost in social status and concomitant financial rewards - are attractive. Not in his case.
But the report also stresses the attraction of the personal gains to the dead man - eternal life in paradise, permission to see the face of Allah, the services of 72 virgins and the privilege to grant life in heaven to 70 relatives.
The will of Hisham Hamed, who blew himself up in 1994 in Gaza, killing three Israel officers, is instructive. Hamed wrote:
'Dear family and friends! I write this will with tears in my eyes and sadness in my heart. I want to tell you that I am leaving and ask for your forgiveness because I decided to see Allah today and this meeting is more important than staying alive on this earth.'
Hamed's example inspired a second suicide bomber, who died in 1995 along with 18 victims. He said:
'I am going to take revenge upon the sons of the monkeys and the pigs, the Zionist infidels and the enemies of humanity. I am going to meet my holy brother Hisham Hamed and all the other martyrs and saints in paradise. Please forgive me.'
And al'Owhali? The FBI don't have the video he recorded in Pakistan, so there are no clues available from that. He was the pampered son of the Saudi elite and had no need of gain, nor of redemption. None of his family had been directly harmed by America or the West. Maybe that was the problem. We can only speculate. All we know is that he said he was happy to die, and then didn't.
Six weeks after recording his video, al' Owhali flew from the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore to Karachi, from where he took a Gulf Air flight to Abu Dhabi, via Muscat. He arrived in Nairobi on 2 August, took a taxi to a suburban Ramada hotel, booked into room 24 and rang Pakistan. He was told to stay where he was. Within an hour a slim, dark East African arrived, paid the hotel bill and then drove him to a house on the outskirts of the city, where four other men greeted him warmly. One was Azzam, the young Saudi who was due to die with him. The men gave him more details about the operation, revealed the plan for the simultaneous attack that was to take place in Dar-es-Salaam, and explained how all those not involved in the actual bombings would leave East Africa for Pakistan on the night before the attack. They ate together, then the five of them walked round to the house's garage. Inside was the beige Toyota truck. The bomb had been ready for two weeks.
But there were still things to be done. On the Wednesday, al'Owhali drove, with two other men, to the American embassy and made a video of the approaches and a sketch map of the surrounding roads.
On the Friday, another man- an Egyptian whom al'Owhali had met in a training camp in Afghanistan - came to the house and prepared the bomb. Then al'Owhali and Azzam were left alone. There was little need to discuss what they would do after the bombing. Dead men don't need escape plans.
Telephone records obtained by the FBI show that at 8:44pm on the eve of the bombing, al'Owhali rang 00 967 1200578, the number of his former comrade in arms, with whom he had stayed in the Yemen. They spoke for a little over seven minutes. At 9.20 the next morning, the day of the attack, he called the Yemen again, speaking this time for three-and-a-half minutes. Azzam called his family in Saudi Arabia. At 9.45am the pair drove the truck away from the house and headed into Nairobi.
When the rescuers first got to the site of the bomb, they were primarily concerned with digging out survivors. The FBI's top forensic explosives experts, flown in within hours of the bombings from all over the world, had to stand aside while the battered, broken bodies of the injured were lifted out of the rubble. But the experts were able to start work by analysing fragments thrown over a wider area.
From the way metal objects around the source of the blast had melted, they deduced that the bomb had created temperatures of more than 5000degreesC. From the position of far- flung lumps of debris, they calculated the angle of blast and began to work out how large the device had been. Much of the destruction was caused by the tall buildings surrounding the embassy reflecting the blast back on to it. They concluded that the bomb had been composed of around 300kg of high explosive. The 1996 Canary Wharf bomb, by comparison, was composed of 200kg of fertiliser soaked in petrol and topped off with some Semtex. The Omagh bomb in 1998 was of a similar size.
The FBI weren't far wrong in their initial estimates. In fact, the bomb truck was carrying six wooden crates, each containing about 40kg of TNT mixed with aluminium nitrate. They were connected to a detonator that itself was wired to several large vehicle batteries and to a dashboard button.
Azzam drove the bomb though the busy Nairobi streets with al'Owhali in the passenger seat. He was wearing a lightweight jacket with his pistol in the pocket. He had also wedged three home-made stun grenades, made from TNT, aluminium powder and tape, in his belt. As they drove along Haile Selassie Avenue, Azzam suggested the jacket might make it hard to reach the stun grenades, so al'Owhali took it off and put it on the seat beside him.
At about 10.37am, they reached the American embassy and drove round the back of the five-storey building before stopping at the drop bar at the entrance to the carpark to the rear. Al'Owhali opened his door, got out and started walking towards the guard on the gate. The plan was for him to force the guards to lift the bar by threatening them with his pistol. Then he was to follow the truck through the gate into the carpark so that if the dashboard detonator did not work for some reason, he could simply unlock the rear doors of the truck and throw in a grenade. He'd die of course - but that was half the point.
But things did not go according to plan. When al'Owhali reached for his pistol, he realised it was in his jacket on his seat in the truck. He hesitated, decided it would take too long to get it and threw a stun grenade at the guards instead, shouting in English. The momentary pause gave them time to scatter. One screamed, 'Bomb! Bomb!' into his radio. The drop bar stayed down. Azzam reached forwards.
Al'Owhali was about 20ft away. It was the moment he had been training for - waiting for for three years. It was the moment he was to die. Azzam pressed the button.
Father John Kiongo, a Catholic priest, was visiting relatives at the embassy at the time. He lost his brother, niece, a hand and his sight. Pinanah Muhoho, an old woman waiting at a bus stop on Haile Selassie Avenue, was also blinded, but also had much of her jaw blown off. Frank Pressley, the embassy's communications manager, was standing in a first-floor office discussing faxes with Michelle O'Connor, an admin manager. He remembered seeing 'blood or red, kind of meat on the walls', and bones sticking up through his shirt and Michelle O'Connor's decapitated body and 'some legs, a pair of just man's legs with the pants on'.
The survivors fought their way down stairwells full of dead and dying people. Many saw their workmates eviscerated or dismembered. For the scores of people buried by the rubble, those first few minutes were merely the beginning. Some took two days to be dug out. Many were never dug out at all.
When al'Owhali saw Azzam reaching towards the dashboard button, he made a decision. He reasoned that the bomb was in position, and so to die would not be martyrdom, but suicide - and therefore a sin. Carefully argued theology? An excuse to live? Either way, he started running.
When, a minute or so later, he came to, he was face down on the pavement of Haile Selassie Avenue - the blast had knocked him off his feet. Around him was a shambles. There was smoke and terrific noise everywhere. On the road, corpses hung from the shattered hulks of buses. He had cuts to his back, his right hand and his forehead.
He picked himself up off the pavement and walked to a first-aid station, noticing when he got there that he still had a stun grenade tucked into his belt, which he dropped in a rubbish bin. After some initial treatment, an ambulance drove him to MP Shah hospital, where his wounds were stitched. Then he went onto the street, looked for cash, found the keys and the bullets, returned to the hospital, found the men's toilets and tried to wash and flush them away. He couldn't, so he hid them on a ledge, walked out of the hospital and started running for the second time that morning.
He set off to find the bomb factory and his passport and documents. Two hours later, he was lost. He asked a taxi to take him to the hotel where he had briefly stayed when he had arrived five days earlier. It was a 30-minute ride. When he got there, he told reception he had been injured in the bombings, had lost everything and asked them to pay his taxi, give him credit for a room and lend him some clothes. In room seven, he changed, stuffed his old clothes in a drawer and called his friend in the Yemen. He asked him to pass a message to Pakistan. 'Tell them,' he said, 'that I haven't travelled.'
Nearly two weeks after the embassy bombings, at about 9.30pm on a Thursday night, around 100 Tomahawk Cruise missiles were launched from two American ships in the Arabian Gulf. Seventy-five headed north, aimed at four training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The rest headed for Sudan, where they destroyed a factory in Khartoum which the Americans said manufactured components for nerve gas for Iraq, and everyone else said made antibiotics for cattle. Of the camps hit in Afghanistan only one, al Badr camp, was linked to bin Laden. There, the missile killed three Yemenis, two Egyptians and a Saudi. In other camps, 21 Pakistanis died as well as a sizeable amount of livestock.
As people woke up across the Islamic world, after the time it took to pray, make tea and turn on the radio or TV, there was outrage. Everywhere, mobs attacked American embassies. The Stars and Stripes was burnt in a dozen capital cities. In Kabul, two soldiers with the UN were shot, and one killed. Sudan's President, Bashir al-Turabi, mindful that Clinton had admitted his relationship with a White House intern three days earlier, dubbed the President a morally decrepit liar'.
I was in Kandahar, 150 miles to the south of the camps, when the missile strikes went in, staying in a United Nations-run guest house in the city. We hid for three days from the mobs combing the city for Westerners, before being evacuated.
Back in Pakistan, the local papers were leading on two stories. From their hospital beds, the young Pakistanis injured in the missile strikes were telling journalists that they were sorry they had not died and that they had now pledged their lives to fight America. And al'Qaeda, using a satellite phone, had issued a statement saying that bin Laden was fine and that 'the battle had not yet begun'.
Northwest London, even on a sunny day, always seems to have a slightly damp air to it. And Willesden seems a damper spot than most. The roads appear to be lined with potholes, crushed soft-drink packets and houses in bad need of paintwork. The only commercial activity seems to be the manufacture of kebabs, small-scale drug dealing and the retail of odd-shaped vegetables of low quality at high prices in underlit groceries. One such shop, called the Grapevine in a rather optimistic bucolic spirit, also offered a fax service. And it was there, on the morning of 7 August, an hour or so before Azzam pressed his dashboard button, that a page of closely written Arabic scrolled off the machine. It was a claim of responsibility for the bombings and was found when, in the days after the bombing, British police raided a number of known Islamic activists. Not only did it still have the name of the Grapevine printed on the header, but also the number of the sender.
The FBI traced the line to Baku in Azerbaijan, and pulled the phone records. They claim these showed a series of calls from 00 873 68505331 - the number of the satellite phone, registered as Kandahar Communications, that the FBI suspected was used by al'Qaeda. So, they got the call records for the Afghan satellite phone. These, as predicted, showed calls to Baku. But they also, the FBI claimed, showed calls to a number in the Yemen, 00 967 1200578, the San'a number of al'Owhali's friend. On the records for that line they could see several calls to and from Nairobi, which could easily be traced to the Ramada Hotel - in the suburb of Iftin in Nairobi, to be exact. The records didn't show the room number. They didn't need to.
Al'Owhali was arrested on 12 August. It took him four days to give the FBI the confession, on which the bulk of this article has been based. He said that as America was his enemy, he wanted to be tried there. He was flown across the Atlantic, spent two years in detention and was brought to trial, with three others, in court 318 of the New York southern district courthouse on 5 February this year. It was cold and the snow was blowing hard across the Manhattan pavements.
The trial lasted six months. The prosecution called 74 witnesses, offered thousands of items of evidence and produced millions of pages of documents. The witnesses ranged from bomb victims to experts on the construction of Toyota Dyna trucks. Much of the government's case against al'Owhali was based on the confession and they went to enormous lengths to prove it was true.
He was, unsurprisingly, found guilty on all counts. So were all the other defendants. Mohammed Odeh, who had helped prepare the bomb and was with al'Owhali on the reconnaissance trip four days before the attack, received a life sentence with no chance of parole. So did Khalfan Khamis Mohammed, who the prosecution admitted was a 'gofer' for the cell in Tanzania. Wadih el Hage, a 40-year-old naturalised American citizen born in the Lebanon and living in Texas, also got life. He was accused of being a key 'facilitator' for both bomb teams.
The government pressed hard for a death penalty. They cited evidence that seemed to show that he felt no remorse for the enormous suffering he had inflicted. They pointed particularly to the broad smile he wore when posing for a Kenyan newspaper photographer during his interrogation.
But the jury decided to spare his life and voted against giving him a lethal injection. Instead, he will spend the rest of his days in prison without parole.
They decided not to kill him for the following reasons.
Ten jurors said he was motivated by sincere religious beliefs and acted because he believed his offences would save other Mus lims. Five said they were convinced that during his formative years al'Owhali was indoctrinated in extremist Muslim teachings that promoted jihad and martyrdom. Four jurors felt the fact that al'Owhali had been raised in a culture and society very different from their own should be considered as a mitigating factor, and 10 said that an execution would merely create a martyr for al'Qaeda's cause.
Nine jurors decided that executing him would not necessarily alleviate survivors or the families of victims from suffering. Four jurors felt that death by lethal injection was too humane, the defendant would not suffer enough. Five said life in prison would be a greater punishment than death.
Al'Owhali gave only two clues about his motivation. During the trial, he rarely spoke. He was impassive throughout the victims' testimonies and the verdicts. The only time he showed animation was when his defence lawyers began arguing that he had attacked the embassies because he felt so strongly about American policy in the Middle East. When the judge questioned whether the young Saudi could have known much about the effects of the American-backed sanctions on Iraq - the dead children, the lack of medicine, the malnutrition - al'Owhali suddenly broke in to stress that 'every day' he had been thinking about it. And then he returned to the silence that he kept throughout the trial.
In Nairobi, he agreed to talk to the FBI after being given a guarantee that he would be tried in America. He said he wanted to go there because America was his enemy and he wanted to fight them, not the Kenyans.
At no other point did he say anything else that gave a clue as to why he had killed 213 people and how he felt about it.
Bin Laden is still in Afghanistan. Most recently he was blamed for the attack on the USS Cole in the Yemen that left 17 American servicemen dead. He denied direct involvement, but said he was glad his teachings might have inspired the deaths. He has back and kidney problems. Recently, his eldest son married the daughter of one of his associates, Abu Hafs, whom many experts believe was responsible for the logistics of the Nairobi bombings.
Al'Qaeda still has its camps. So do many other hardline Islamic organisations. Thousands of young men from all over the Islamic world volunteer every year for training in them. The bone-dry hills of eastern Afghanistan still echo to the sounds of small- arms fire and the dull thud of artillery and the shouts of angry, young men full of hate and hurt. No one thinks they will fall silent soon.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Most of them are single men, and in the Islamic culture, the better men get 4 wives leaving these men to never pass on genes or be part of a family, their purpose in the culture is to die young to preserve that culture. They have no other purpose in life.
He (bin Laden) denied direct involvement, but said he was glad his teachings might have inspired the deaths.
Sounds just like Charles Manson.
WASHINGTON, Dec 1
While in the army, Mohamed boasted to fellow soldiers that he had used leave time to fight with Mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan and later offered military training to Islamic militants in New York, the New York Times reported. At the same time, he was serving with the US Army's Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, where he played the part of an Islamic radical in army training videos and wrangled an interview with a CIA representative, who joked that Mohamed might already be a "spook," the Times said, It would not have been the first time that Mohamed met with the CIA. A US government official confirmed that Mohamed first approached the CIA in 1984, volunteering to spy for the agency. But in 1985 after learning that their recruit had made contact with a Hezbollah group in Germany and told them he was working with the CIA, the agency cut him off and had him put on a watch list as a security risk, the official said. The CIA issued a second warning about Mohamed when it learned he had managed to obtained a visa. Despite the watch list, Mohamed turned up in the United States, where he enlisted in the army in August 1986. |
Army spokesman Colonel John Smith confirmed that Mohamed served in the US army from 1986 to 1989, and was assigned to the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg and received airborne training. He said the army was looking into whether supervisors reporters that Mohamed had boasted of fighting with the Afghan Mujahedeen during a 1988 leave had been followed up on. "We are still trying to see if we have any records of any investigations," he said. Mohamed did not have a security clearance but his job as an administration specialist did put him in the headquarters of the army's elite "green berets" and ultimately on the staff of its training center, the army said. "He initially served as supply sergeant for the headquarters company of the John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center," an army statement said. "Because of his native fluency in Arabic and other language skills, and his familiarity with the Middle East, he was later invited to serve as an assistant instructor on the staff," it said. "In this capacity he assisted the Middle East seminar director to prepare and instruct classes related to the Middle East's political environment, history, culture, economy, armed forces and religions," it said. In 1989, his last year in the army, Mohamed was offering military training to militants associated with a Brooklyn, New York refugee center, teaching them survival techniques, map reading and how to recognize Soviet weaponry, the Times said, citing trial testimony. Prosecutors now contend that the refugee center was the main US base for Al Qaeda, a group led by Osama bin Laden. "We have no knowledge or record concerning what his associations with persons who may have been terrorists may have been," the army statement said. He came to the attention of the FBI in 1993 after being detained by Canadian border authorities while accompanying a suspected associate of bin Laden who was trying to enter the US with false documents, the Times said. Over the next few years, he apparently provided the FBI with some information about bin Laden, who was becoming the focus of an investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Times said. But in September, he was arrested on charges of conspiring with Saudi expatriate Osama bin Laden in the bombings the month before of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. |
I would also have highlighted the following paragraph:
In 1996, when he was 19, a friend returned from fighting in Bosnia and started him thinking about joining a jihad himself.
Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania. Can there be any doubt that the Jihad is being taken to Europe. In a few years we'll hear about the Turks in Germany and the Algerians in France. Welcome to the Jihad Century
"Wadih el Hage, a 40-year-old naturalised American citizen born in the Lebanon and living in Texas, also got life. He was accused of being a key 'facilitator' for both bomb teams.
1. which town in texas did el Hage reside in? surely not San Antonio? Dallas maybe?
would being a key "facilitator" inclulde financing/money raising/support functions for the texas cell?
thinden, I noticed that Texas connection too. Have you read about the individual who refuses to be interrogated by the FBI? - he lives in Maryland (Laurel?) and moved there from Texas just last year.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.