Posted on 03/02/2003 6:08:43 PM PST by Wallaby
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KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, the terrorist mastermind arrested in Pakistan yesterday, is believed to have been involved in planning every significant al-Qaeda attack since 1993.
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Documents and photographs found in Peshawar in 1993 by American officials investigating the World Trade Center bombing suggest that Mohammed was linked to the operation, though he has never been indicted. |
In June last year American investigators identified Mohammed as the probable mastermind behind the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, in which more than 3,000 people died. His involvement with al-Qaeda stretches further back, however, at least to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, an attack for which Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, is serving a life sentence.
In 1996 Mohammed was indicted in America for his alleged role in a plot to blow up civilian airliners over the Pacific. He is also believed to have played a role in planning the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
Mohammed was born in Kuwait on April 24 1965, the son of a preacher who had emigrated to the prosperous Gulf emirate from the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The family was allegedly stripped of Kuwaiti citizenship after a row with a local family, leaving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to grow up resentfully aware of the gap between his family and prosperous Kuwaiti society. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest international fundamentalist Islamic organisation.
In 1983 he went to America to study mechanical engineering at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. The following year he moved on to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where fellow students remember that he refused to mix with American students and raised money for Arab causes.
When he left in 1986 he went to Peshawar in northern Pakistan to join the Afghan struggle against the Soviet invaders. By that stage Mohammed's three brothers, Zahid, Abed and Aref, were already part of the Afghan jihad. Abed and Aref were later to die for the cause. It was in Peshawar that Mohammed probably first made contact with bin Laden - then an unknown but wealthy young Saudi Arabian who was funding Arab extremists to fly out to fight alongside the mujahideen, with the blessing of the Americans. For five years Mohammed remained in Pakistan and devoted himself to the cause.
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 the US withdrew its support from bin Laden. On February 26 1993 a rented lorry exploded in the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring thousands. Within weeks the chief suspect was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef; Mohammed's brother, Zahid, was also wanted for questioning.
Documents and photographs found in Peshawar in 1993 by American officials investigating the World Trade Center bombing suggest that Mohammed was linked to the operation, though he has never been indicted. By that point Mohammed was in Karachi, where he operated an import-export company whose products included bottled holy water from Mecca.
After the World Trade Center bombing Mohammed and Yousef joined forces in a new phase of international Islamist terrorism from a base in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. They started with a string of small-scale bombings.
Mohammed acted as financier and coordinator, through another company based in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, which traded Sudanese honey. He travelled widely, including at least one trip to Brazil, promoting the lucrative business enterprises generating the funds used by his nephew.
In his terrorist career Mohammed is known to have used at least 27 aliases; his personality is said to be equally complicated. Despite detesting Westerners, he has a taste for high living, exhibited when he lived in the Philippines in 1994 and 1995. There he dated go-go dancers, stayed in luxury hotels and once rented a helicopter to fly past a girlfriend's office window in an effort to impress her. Posing as a businessman from Qatar, the tiny Gulf emirate, he visited beach clubs, where he was remembered by one waitress as having "excess meat" on his ring finger. He would pay for lavish dinners with a wad of cash. The culmination of Mohammed's activity in the Philippines was to have been Operation Bojinka, an ambitious plot to blow up 11 or 12 American airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean. The plan was foiled accidentally by police who stumbled across incriminating computer files while investigating a possible assassination attempt on the Pope.
Yousef fled to Pakistan and was arrested in Islamabad in 1995, but Mohammed evaded capture and made a new base for himself in Qatar. He was given a post in the ministry of public works but continued to travel abroad under an assumed name.
When the FBI closed in on him in Qatar in 1996 he fled again, this time to Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taliban. In 1997 Mohammed's wife and child joined him there. It is at this point that he is believed to have moved from the periphery to the centre of bin Laden's terror network, becoming the head of its military committee. He was put in charge of terrorist operations in south-east Asia but by 1999 he was already contemplating reviving the idea behind the abortive Bojinka operation and using civilian airliners as terrorist weapons in a strike on America.
At a Kandahar guesthouse, known as the Ghumad, Mohammed assembled a team, led by Mohammed Atta. Training moved to al-Qaeda's camps at Khost, before the trainee hijackers were sent to Hamburg. Mohammed visited them there over the next two years, giving them guidance as they prepared for the attack.
After the September 11 atrocity Mohammed fled to Pakistan, where he remained in hiding, trying to rebuild the terrorist network in the wake of the defeat of its Taliban allies in Afghanistan in late 2001. He was one of hundreds of al-Qaeda militants and their Taliban allies believed to have crossed into Pakistan since the end of Taliban rule.
Last night senior American officials were jubilant at Mohammed's arrest.
"He's the senior-most al-Qaeda guy to be captured," said one official. "He was critical not only to the planning of the September 11 attacks but also central to the planning for future attacks, so his capture is extraordinarily significant."
Here here!
I still think they're just cleaning house at the middle-management level.
That says it all. Behind every crazed Islamic freak lies an engineering career gone bad.
Osama bin Laden was a civil engineer by trade, and one of the ringleaders in the 1993 WTC bombing was a chemical engineer who lived in New Jersey at the time.
Plan B did not involve changing my name to Mohammed Al-Berta and pursuing a career in hijacking. LOL.
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