Arrest of Khalid: Another of Hydra's heads?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described by Major General Rashid Qureshi, the media spokesman of President General Pervez Musharraf, as "the kingpin of al-Qaeda", was arrested by Pakistani intelligence officials from the house of the son ( Abdul Qadoos) of a local women's leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), at Rawalpindi over the weekend, and handed over to officials of the US intelligence community based in Pakistan. The latter immediately airlifted him to the US naval base in Diego Garcia for interrogation.

It is understood that an Arab and the Pakistani son of the JEI leader was also arrested by the Pakistani authorities during the raid. While the arrested Pakistani has not been handed over to US officials, it is not clear as to whether the Arab is also now in US custody.

According to details available so far, during the interrogation of two members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) arrested in Karachi last month on a tip-off from some members of the Kashmiri Shi'ite community of Karachi hailing from Gilgit, the intelligence officials came to know of the whereabouts of another wanted LEJ terrorist, who had taken shelter in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan. He, too, was then arrested and questioned. He is reported to have revealed that Khalid was staying with him, but had managed to escape just before the raid. He gave the address of the JEI leader's son in Rawalpindi as one of the likely places where he might have taken shelter.

The house in Rawalpindi was raided thereafter and Khalid and the Arab were arrested. Khalid had first come to notice in 1995 when he was reportedly involved, along with Ramzi Yousef, formerly of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the political wing of the LEJ, in a plot for a series of terrorist attacks directed against US airlines and other American interests. Khalid and Ramzi Yousef, described as Khalid's nephew, had drawn up the plot from a hideout in Manila, where they had taken shelter after the involvement of Ramzi in the explosion at the World Trade Center at New York in February, 1993.

Following an accidental fire in their hideout, which drew the attention of the Filipino authorities to their presence and activities in Manila, they escaped to Pakistan. While Ramzi was arrested by the Pakistani authorities and handed over to US officials for trial in the World Trade Center explosion case in which he was convicted along with others and sentenced to life imprisonment, Khalid had been absconding since then.

Accounts emanating since September 11 from US intelligence officials and some non-governmental counter-terrorism experts known for their proximity to the US intelligence agencies, who generally reflect in their analyses the views of US intelligence, have projected Khalid as the real action man of Osama bin Laden and as the man who orchestrated the September 11 terrorist strikes in the US. In an interview with al-Jazeera TV in the last week of August, 2002, Khalid and Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni member of al-Qaeda, had bragged about their role in September 11, and Khalid, during his talk with an al-Jazeera correspondent, was reported to have introduced himself as the head of al-Qaeda's military committee. The correspondent reported that he interviewed them in a hideout in Karachi.

US intelligence officials then organized a hunt for them in Karachi and, through electronic intercepts, managed to locate their hideout, which was raided by the Pakistani authorities on September 11, 2002. During an exchange of fire lasting about four hours, Khalid managed to escape, but Ramzi Binalshibh was captured and airlifted to Diego Garcia for interrogation. According to US officials, he was also to have joined in the hijacking of the aircraft in the US on September 11, but could not do so as he could not get a US visa. Since then, US officials have been hunting for Khalid.

Since 1995, the following six terrorists involved in acts of terrorism against US nationals and interests have been among those arrested in Pakistan:

Ramzi Yousef, involved in the World Trade Center explosion of February,1993. Mir Aimal Kansi, involved in the murder of two officers of the CIA outside their office in Langley, US, in January,1993. He has since been executed in the US after his conviction in that case. Sheikh Omar, involved in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist kidnapped in January-February-2002. He actually surrendered to a former official of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who was then posted as the Home Secretary of Punjab in Lahore. Abu Zubaidah, described by US officials as the No 3 man in al-Qaeda after the death of Mohammed Atef during the US air strikes in Afghanistan. He was arrested from a hideout of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of Pakistan at Faislabad in Punjab on March 28, 2002, and flown to Diego Garcia. Ramzi Binalshibh arrested in Karachi on September 11, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.

Under Pakistani law, anyone arrested in Pakistani territory for a criminal offense has to be produced before a local court, tried for any offense pending against him in Pakistan and only then deported or extradited to any foreign country to face trial in that country. The Pakistani authorities strictly followed this procedure in the Daniel Pearl case, and have until now refused to hand over Sheikh Omar to the US authorities. He has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court, but his appeal against the death sentence has not yet been disposed off. Their refusal to hand him over to the US for interrogation and trial in the US is due to his past linkages with the ISI, his self-confessed role as the kingpin of the ISI's terrorist operations in Indian territory and his reported claim, as made to the Karachi police during his interrogation, that during a visit to Kandahar in Afghanistan before September 11 he had come to know of al-Qaeda's plans for the terrorist strikes in the US and had passed on the information to Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then the Corps Commander in Peshawar. The Pakistani authorities were worried that if he made these disclosures to the US interrogators, the US might be constrained to act against Pakistan.

In the case of the other five, the Pakistani authorities had no hesitation in informally handing them over to US officials without following the due process of law since they were apparently confident that these five were unlikely to implicate Pakistan in any acts of terrorism during their interrogation by US agencies. Sheikh Omar was a UK resident of Pakistani origin and Abu Zubaidah, a Palestinian. Binalshibh is a Yemeni and the other three are stated to be Yemeni-Balochis, of mixed Yemeni-Balochi parentage. There is considerable confusion about the nationalities of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid. Some past reports that they were Kuwaiti nationals have been denied by the Kuwaiti authorities. Pakistani authorities have denied that they are Pakistani nationals. Ramzi Yousef entered the US as an Iraqi national fleeing persecution from the Saddam Hussein government, participated in carrying out the explosion and fled the US with a Pakistani passport issued by the Pakistani consulate in New York. From this, sections of the Pakistani media used to refer to him and Khalid as Pakistani nationals of Iraqi origin.

When Abu Zubaidah was arrested, US officials projected him as the most significant catch and one that was likely to disrupt future al-Qaeda operations. Their claims were belied by the series of terrorist strikes thereafter in Pakistan and other countries. Similar claims made after the arrest of Binalshibh were belied by the terrorist strikes in Bali and Mombassa.

The fact that neither of them could help in the prevention of the terrorist strikes that followed showed that while they might have been knowledgeable about the acts of terrorism of the past in which they had participated, they had little knowledge of the operations planned for the future.

This is because the operations of bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) after September 11 are being planned and carried out by the remnants of the various components of the IIF acting autonomously without any central planning and coordination. Even though bin Laden claimed responsibility for these terrorist strikes in his al-Jazeera broadcast of November 12, 2002, it is uncertain whether he himself had any advance knowledge of thee strikes by different local units of the IIF.

It is doubtful, therefore, whether the arrest of Khalid will cause any major disruptions in the operations of the IIF, which is spread out in Asia. Claims that his arrest could deliver a serious blow to terrorist operations in Southeast Asia are unduly over-optimistic and unwarranted.

B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.

The new info (to me) is that Khalid is in Diego Garcia. I had not seen that reported before. I'm not sure how good Asia Times sources are.

The author takes a rather pessimistic and anti-US stance. How would he know that all attacks are locally planned, rather than centrally? How would he know that the capture of various al-Qaeda leaders have not disrupted this network?

Take such comments with a box of salt.

He is being held outside the U.S., and doubtfully in Guantanamo, which is too vulnerable to outsider peaceniks. Afghanistan and Diego Garcia have been two places mentioned.

As I recall, although the hydra had a habit of growing new heads when the old ones were cut off, the monster was eventually defeated. We will never eliminate all the bad guys, but we can weaken and scatter them, and eventually as they are seen to be ineffectual, people's minds will turn in some other direction and they will be starved of new recruits.

Anarchistic bomb-throwers represented a similar threat in the nineteenth century, but eventually the world moved on to other things.

After the the pulled thread from last night, Asia Times should not be considered credible. That article stated that Khalid was killed in the Sept 02 raid. The zotted poster of that thread was trying to say that Khalid has been in custody since that raid.

I can find no such article at the asiatimes.com site. Do you have a link?

I've known Asia Times to be anti-US, but not subject to poor fact checking, except in editorial pieces.

Thanks for the link. Date was October 30, 2002, so it's four months old already. I didn't look that far back.

Asia Times has gotten stuff wrong before; look up anything Pepe Escobar has written. I just didn't think the contagion had spread.

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