Posted on 09/14/2002 9:00:04 PM PDT by ReadMyMind
By one o'clock it was all over. The police were on the roof of the bullet-riddled building, seven of the gunmen were in custody and two were dead. Spent cartridges littered the ground for hundreds of yards around the white apartment block and smoke from a grenade blast blackened its entry. On the roof were thick smears of blood from the dead and the wounded. In the kitchen of the fifth floor apartment where the gunmen had been living was more. On the white wall Arabic script read: There is no God but Allah. It had been written by one of the gunmen with his own blood.
Whether Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the 30-year-old Yemeni and mastermind of the 11 September attacks who was the prize catch of the raid, had written it may never be known. But for the police and investigators it was a chilling reminder of the sort of man they were dealing with. And the sort of men they were still hunting.
Al-Shibh's trail had been picked up 15 days earlier when an American spy satellite had intercepted a phone call from a mobile Nera satellite phone made by someone US analysts suspected was an al-Qaeda activist living in Karachi. From the little they could understand it sounded as if the man, who was unidentified, was involved in running al-Qaeda activists out of Pakistan, where they had taken shelter after the assault on Afghanistan last year, and back to their home countries in the Middle East.
The tip had been passed to the Pakistani military intelligence services, the ISI. But the information was vague. And everyone already knew there were al-Qaeda men hiding in the southern port. Of its 14 million population around a seventh are from the Pashtun tribes that dominate in southern and eastern Afghanistan, who provided the bulk of the support for the Taliban. Hundreds of former fighters from the hardline militia, their allies among extremist groups in Pakistan and Bin Laden's own men are known to have disappeared into Karachi's huge squatter camps.
Just three months previously, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khaled Mohammed Sheikh, the man who some are calling the 'new bin Laden', had been interviewed in Karachi by al-Jazeera, the Qatari TV station.
'It's a huge city. I don't know where half my own officers are half the time, let alone the terrorists,' said one senior police officer.
The ISI needed better information before they undertook any operations. Though Moinuddin Haider, the Pakistani Minister for the Interior, was briefed on the intercepted phone call, there was little that could be done.
The breakthrough came on Monday night. For the Americans, on the eve of the commemoration of 11 September, it could not have been better timed.
The police had been watching groups of Arabs in the city for some time. There had been a series of attacks on Westerners in Karachi. A dozen people were killed in a car bomb outside the US Consulate in June. A month earlier, 11 French engineers and three Pakistanis were killed when their bus was blown up outside the Sheraton Hotel.
In January, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later murdered. Pakistan's homegrown Islamic terrorist outfits were thought to be responsible.
Al-Qaeda operatives were suspected of liaising with local Islamic extremists to launch the attacks. The new sophistication of the bombs and the use of suicide attacks revealed the Arabs' involvement.
However, when the police and the ISI raided an address on Monday morning in the Bahadurabad suburb of Karachi, they found their suspects had already moved on. Then came the break. The gatekeeper of the building led them to another address.
The flat was in the upmarket Defense housing project, where construction magnates have been building plush new apartments for Karachi's burgeoning middle class. During the night the police surrounded a five-story building in 'Commercial Area Phase 2' - a mixed complex of shops and housing that had been constructed two years earlier. On three sides of the block was open space. Only two of the apartments were occupied. On the first floor there was a family. On the fifth were the targets. The ISI set up surveillance.
The ISI teams waited all day and through the night. Shortly after 7am on the morning of Wednesday 11 September they finally saw their targets. Three men walked out of the building and crossed the road, apparently heading for a food stall to buy breakfast. The ISI team moved in swiftly and the three were arrested and later identified as Yemenis.
But then the operation began to break down. As the suspects were being led away, one of them screamed a warning to his colleagues still in the building. The police went in immediately. It was clear very quickly that they were inadequately prepared. As squads of paramilitary rangers and local police fanned out around the building, they came under intense fire from automatic weapons fired through the windows of the flat on the fifth floor. The police were armed with AK47s, rifles and handguns. Though there were detachments of Rangers, specially trained paramilitaries who are specifically tasked with countering Karachi's endemic violence, at the scene, none had the high-powered weaponry they needed.
As a group of policemen tried to storm up the building's one stairwell, the Arabs above them dropped two grenades down the stairs. Two policemen were severely injured and, under heavy fire, dragged back to safety by colleagues.
As the scale of the fighting became obvious, police and Rangers flooded the area. By the end of the morning, more than 2,000 had been deployed, throwing a cordon around a square kilometre of Karachi. Local householders flooded out. 'It looked like refugees fleeing a battle zone,' said one witness.
But the fierce resistance had alerted the police to what they faced. As they worked their way onto roof tops they called on the Arabs to surrender, and were met with volleys of gunfire and shouts of 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great).
'Everything is at stake. The very future of Pakistan is at stake,' Azhar Hassan Nadeem, Deputy Inspector General of Police, told reporters.
And this time it was a purely local operation. So far it appears that the operation - unlike the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, the acting operations chief of al-Qaeda in the eastern Pakistani city of Faisalabad in March - was completed without the assistance of the Americans. FBI agents arrived on the scene only as the fighting ended, onlookers said. 'They went about it the hard way,' one FBI source laconically told The Observer. 'Maybe next time they'll let us help them out a little more.'
Once the gunmen in the apartment itself had been shot dead it was impossible for those on the roof, pinned down by police from surrounding rooftops, to cover the stairs. The police rushed the building and captured the remaining seven terrorists, an Egyptian, a Saudi and five Yemenis. Blindfolded with rags and with their wrists chained or tied together they led them out to waiting vehicles. Hours later the news broke. They had not just broken up an al-Qaeda cell. They had seized one of the most wanted men in the world.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh was born on 1 May, 1972, in Hadramawt, Yemen. Hadramawt is a remote and fiercely conservative region, now famous for being the birthplace of Mohamed bin Laden, the Saudi construction magnate whose seventeenth son is Osama. Bin al-Shibh, described as a slightly built man about 5ft 7in tall, who moved from Yemen to Germany in about 1995, where he befriended a young Egyptian town planner called Mohamed Atta. The two shared an apartment in Hamburg in 1998 and 1999.
Bin al-Shibh worked with Atta at a computer company's warehouse in Hamburg. The American federal indictment against Zacarias Moussaoui, the Algerian who is alleged to have trained to be a hijacker in 11 September attacks before being arrested last August, reveals that Bin al-Shibh, along with three of the eventual hijackers, formed an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg beginning in about 1998. German prosecutors allege that in late 1999, Bin al-Shibh, Atta and two other hijackers travelled to Afghanistan to co-ordinate their planning with senior al-Qaeda aides.
Later, one of the suspected hijackers tried to enrol Bin al-Shibh, also known as Ramzi Muhamed Abdullah Omar, in a flight school in Florida. At the beginning of 2000, Bin al-Shibh unsuccessfully applied for visas to the United States, both from Germany and Yemen. American officials have said that he was not on a watch list as a suspected terrorist, but that the visa requests were denied because State Department guidelines then placed rigorous standards on Yemenis seeking to enter the United States.
Bin al-Shibh is believed by many American investigators to have been the designated twentieth hijacker in the 11 September attacks. But he was denied visas to enter the United States four times, even as other al-Qaeda operatives slipped into the country and began planning the hijackings.
After the young Yemeni was unable to get into the United States, the leaders of the plot may have tried to find someone else to take part in the hijacking of the fourth plane, FBI officials told The Observer. That man, they allege, was Moussaoui.
But even after his visa applications were rejected, Bin al-Shibh continued to act in Hamburg as a go-between for the various hijacker cells already in the United States, officials said.
In July 2001, using an alias of Ahad Sabet, he received two wire transfers in Germany, totalling $15,000 (£9,673), from a man identified as Hashim Abdulrahman in the United Arab Emirates. In the same month, he travelled to a resort in Spain, where he is believed to have met with Atta, who had flown from Florida.
Days later, Bin al-Shibh, again using the name Ahad Sabet, went to stations in Dusseldorf and Hamburg in order to wire about $14,000 (£9,028) in money orders to Moussaoui, in Oklahoma.
Just days before the attacks, Bin al-Shibh travelled from Dusseldorf to Madrid. He is believed to have eventually fled from Spain to Pakistan.
Bin al-Shibh could prove to be an important source of information about the inner workings of the 11 September plot and could answer many of the unresolved questions about how the attackers put together the operation. Pakistani sources last night confirmed that he is being held with the four others in an undisclosed high-security location in Karachi. A senior police source described the prisoners as 'very tough'. One answered all questions with the words: 'My name is Abdullah.'
Osama bin Laden's favoured nomme de guerre is Abu Abdullah, the father of Abdullah.
PERPS TAKEN:
In Karachi, Pakistan, on Sept. 11, 2002, terrorists were taken from a residential building
they had taken. Two terrorists were put to ground,
and 5 captured after a three-hour battle. They were Al Qaeda.
Nearby in Karachi, Pakistan, the graffiti reads,
"Suicidal attacks will continue against America".
REUTERS/Zahid Hussein
A job well done.
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| Sat Sep 14, 2:58 AM ET |
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Undated file photo released January 17, 2002 by the U.S. government of Ramzi Binalshibh. Wanted by Germany for allegedly planning and helping to carry out the September 11 hijacked plane attacks on the United States, Binalshibh has been captured in Pakistan, U.S. officials said September 13, 2002. His capture came just days after a journalist with al-Jazeera Arabic satellite television said he interviewed Binalshibh in Pakistan. Binalshibh and another key al Qaeda member reportedly affirmed that Osama bin Laden was personally involved in planning the attacks that killed about 3,000 people. Photo by Reuters (Handout) |
Yeah, the Pak's should have had APC's and Tanks equipped with flamethrowers on hand, then the FBI could have demonstrated how to have a Waco-style barbecue.
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Seriously, why would they need anything more powerful than AK47s, rifles and handguns? It sounds like some CS gas would have been very helpful.
What your pic shows is spray painted grafitti.
I wish they wouldn't inform the bad guys how we catch them.
The ISI teams waited all day and through the night... police and Rangers flooded the area... By the end of the morning, more than 2,000 had been deployed,
This is why we have to careful about proclaiming a war on Islam. Too many Muslims fighting on our side. It would be nice to keep it that way.
And for lots of unpleasant days ahead for those still on this planet.
COOL...
A subject fraught with peril...........;-)
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