December 7, 2001
Officials Say Bomber of the Cole Was in Yemeni Custody Earlier
By JAMES RISEN and RAYMOND BONNER
ne of the suicide bombers who attacked the destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden last year had been arrested — and released — just 17 months earlier by Yemeni authorities on charges of conspiring to kidnap Americans working in Yemen.
The suspect, Hassan Said Awadh Khemeri, a Yemeni who had trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan run by Osama bin Laden, was one of several suspects in the Cole attack who had been arrested in prior cases but released, according to interviews with officials in Yemen and the United States.
These interviews suggest that Yemeni authorities knew more about the men who attacked the Cole than they have acknowledged, and that they failed to scrutinize the ties of men long suspected of extremist activity.
American law enforcement officials complain that Yemeni officials have withheld information about the Cole plot from the United States. Indeed, several American investigators suspect that some Yemeni government officials knew about the attack before it was launched on Oct. 12 last year.
One Yemeni official familiar with his country's investigation has charged that crucial evidence that he says links Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the bombing has never been turned over to the F.B.I.
The evidence cited by the official included a letter believed to have been written by Mr. bin Laden and found in the house of one of the suspected Cole plotters in Yemen. It could provide the firmest link yet between Al Qaeda and the bombing, which killed 17 American sailors.
The letter is believed to have been written in Afghanistan and taken to Yemen by a Saudi extremist who later, in January 2000, met in Malaysia with one of the men suspected of hijacking the plane used to attack the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
The botched detentions and general reticence of Yemeni officials during the investigation of the Cole bombing illustrate how hard it is for American investigators to forge a partnership with Arab countries like Yemen.
Like several other Muslim states, Yemen is now vowing to help the Bush administration fight terrorism. But Islamic extremists have also thrived there for years, and the country's leaders must walk a delicate line between cooperating with Washington and trying not to rile Yemenis deeply hostile to the United States.
Evidence like the letter apparently written by Mr. bin Laden has been extremely rare in past investigations of Al Qaeda operations, and until now American officials have said they could not directly link Mr. bin Laden to the bombing of the Cole.
The Yemeni official said that the letter was found in the house of Jamal al-Badawi, a suspect now under arrest in Yemen in connection with the Cole bombing. The letter, written in late 1997, is not addressed to anyone by name, but includes general instructions for an attack on American ships cruising off the coast of Aden, according to the official.
The official said that the letter had been brought back from Afghanistan by Tawfiq al-Atash, a Saudi of Yemeni descent who lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan.
American officials say they believe Mr. Atash is the highest-ranking figure in the Cole plot that they have been able to identify. He was first arrested in Yemen in 1996, when authorities suspected he might have ties to Mr. bin Laden, the Yemeni official said. But he too was released, and continued to travel back and forth from Afghanistan.
Adulaziz al-Atash, Tawfiq's brother, was — like Mr. Khemeri — among the 16 Islamists arrested and later released in connection with a 1999 plan to kidnap Americans working at a Baptist hospital in the remote Yemeni village of Jiblah, according to Yemeni documents and the Yemeni official.
American officials say that Tawfiq al-Atash, who is still at large and who may be hiding in Afghanistan, and other suspects in the Cole bombing met in January last year in Malaysia with Khalid al-Midhar, another Saudi of Yemeni descent who was one of the hijackers of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Khalid al-Midhar may have been a distant relative, or at least a member of the same tribal clan, of a Yemeni terrorist leader named Zeinabidin al-Midhar, who had formed an extremist group called the Islamic Army of Aden and Abyen. The suspects in the 1999 hospital kidnapping plot had planned to demand Zeinabidin al-Midhar's freedom from a Yemeni prison, the Yemeni official said. Zeinabidin al-Midhar was later executed.
American officials cannot confirm the existence of the letter said to have been from Mr. bin Laden. But they say they do know that Yemeni authorities conducted searches of at least eight safe houses and other locations before allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to inspect them. The sites included the house of Mr. al-Badawi, the suspected courier.
Although it was written three years before the Cole attack, the letter's timing would fit al Qaeda's pattern of showing patience and long-term planning before conducting terrorist operations.
Two suspects in the Cole bombing case were first arrested in 1997 after they aroused suspicions because they appeared to be training for something on small boats in the Gulf of Aden, the Yemeni official said.
"It was clear they were an organized group and that they were working on something, and they had been training in Afghanistan," the Yemeni official said. At the time, the authorities thought they might be smuggling weapons.
In January 2000, a group that included some of the suspects later involved in the Cole operation tried to bomb another destroyer, The Sullivans, while it was in port in Aden.
The attempt on the The Sullivans was botched, but American officials did not learn of that plot until after the Cole bombing. Some individuals were involved in both attempts, although the Sullivans plotters seemed more amateurish, they said.
Some American officials say they do not know whether to blame the complicity of a few Yemeni government officials or the incompetence of a small and unsophisticated security service for problems in the Cole investigation.
In an interview in Yemen, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former prime minister and now the chief political advisor to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, denied that any government officials knew about the Cole plot before the attack.
"That's not true, absolutely not," he said. "It's nonsense." While Mr. Iryani acknowledged that there had been "a little bit of foot-dragging" in Yemen's cooperation with the F.B.I. early in the Cole investigation, all such problems have disappeared since Sept. 11, he said. But Mr. al- Iryani and Rashid al-Alimi, Yemen's minister of interior, refused to discuss almost all of the details of the Cole investigation.
The Yemeni official who disclosed the letter also said some Yemeni security officials failed to cooperate fully with American investigators.
Muhammed Omar al-Harazi, who has been identified by American and Yemeni officials as a tactical coordinator in the Cole plot, stayed in Yemen for months after the attack, the Yemeni official charged.
The allegation directly contradicts the repeated public statements by the Yemeni government that it believes Mr. Harazi fled the country just before the Cole bombing.
Another suspect, Muhammad Ahmed al-Suwh, was detained and then released six months before the Cole attack, after authorities became suspicious that he had traveled to Afghanistan seven times, the Yemeni official said.
American law enforcement officials stress that Yemeni cooperation in the Cole investigation has improved since Sept. 11. Yemeni officials have turned over some new telephone numbers and other evidence that provide new leads, and F.B.I. officials are expected to return to Yemen for further investigative work.
In late November, President Saleh traveled to Washington to meet with President Bush, who praised Yemen's cooperation on combating terrorism. The White House is particularly pleased that Yemen has agreed to delay the trials of Cole bombing suspects now in custody, because American investigators hope more time will produce more leads back to the Al Qaeda network.
Still, American officials said the Yemeni authorities had not told the F.B.I. exactly how many suspects had been arrested or detained, and that remains a clear source of frustration.
"We had collected more evidence within a week of the Oklahoma City bombing than we have in more than a year since the Cole," said one American law enforcement official.
Several strands of evidence in the Cole investigation lead into Saudi Arabia, where American investigators acknowledge some improvement in cooperation since Sept. 11 but some are still not satisfied. The boat used in the Cole attack was purchased in the Saudi town of Jizan, officials said.
As one American official put it: "Leads go into Saudi Arabia, but then everything just goes dead."