Replies

(More from the same reporter)

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001

Deadly secrets left by fleeing Taleban

FROM ANTHONY LOYD IN KABUL

THE al-Qaeda men had left in a hurry on Monday night. They took with them their weapons and explosives but there was not time to load all the documents on their vehicles and in their haste they allowed the tops of the bundled sheets to spill across the corridor floors.
Someone had tried to burn this residue but the flames were weak and left the job unfinished.

Another unknown person scattered anti-personnel mines across the ground near the house, either by accident or intent. Then they fled.

When looking through the documents they left behind, it becomes apparent that most are no more than the bomb-making literature one would expect a terrorist organisation to possess. It is only when the neat, handwritten notes of a mathematician or scientist turn their focus to the detailed studies of mach speeds, conical areas, liquid rocket fuel and plutonium — atomic number 94 — that the hair begins to crawl on the back of your neck.

For whatever other dark business may have occurred in the al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul, a lot of time and effort had been devoted within them to researching the creation of an atomic device.

There is an intelligence vacuum in the city at present. A few “spooks”, American and British, have moved into the capital and are doubtless going about their work, but none had so far visited the four al-Qaeda houses I saw yesterday. Each had been ransacked by Afghan civilians and Mujahidin in the wake of the Arabs’ fast departure on Monday night, but looters were interested only in the stocks of medicine and clothes left behind. The Afghans have more immediate appetites than carrying away literature and documents written in the alien languages of Arabic, German, Urdu and English.

I was taken to the first house, a two-storey building in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city, by a British cameraman familar with Kabul after years of experience in the country. It lay opposite an induction centre for Pakistani and Arab recruits coming to Afghanistan to learn their trade.

“Two years ago the Talebs moved some Arabs, Egyptians and Pakistanis to the house after the induction centre became too full,” Wakil, 46, a former policeman who lived next door, said.

“There were about 60 or 70 of them who lived here. At any one time there would be up to 20 while the others rotated through the front lines. They kept to themselves and were not friendly but I knew their watchman, an Afghan named Baten Shah. He used to tell me a bit about them.”

The documents lay strewn around the top floor, along with copies of aircraft magazines advertising flying instruction manuals, navigation instruments and flight charts.

There was a lot of propaganda and religious material embossed with symbols, including Islamic flags smashing through the Union Flag and Stars and Stripes, and the blackened claws of Israel, America, Britain, France and the United Nations ripping at a map of Saudi Arabia.

Lying among Canadian passport applications, journals, letters and English language courses, the majority of the al-Qaeda documents were simple guerrilla instructions on the use of infantry weapons and manufacture of bombs, as well as studies of American special forces, the SAS and Western hostage-rescue techniques.

The majority of the bomb-making instructions were easy to understand and used domestic items, including Alka Seltzer tubes, condoms, wax, mousetraps and cigarettes as contact switches to initiate charges.

These sound innocuous enough, but the notes included details on how to put the items to use so that a victim opening a book or turning a door handle would be blown to pieces.

There was an abundance of material related to bridge and road blowing, and some sinister notes examining the air-conditioning systems of apartment buildings.

The handful of local Afghans and street children who were idly looting the first house were so oblivious of its significance that when I asked if they knew any other houses where Arab fighters had lived they were happy to show me. Of the four buildings I explored, two in Karte Parwan and two further east, one had been lived in by Chechens, one by Yemenis (allegedly including family members of Osama bin Laden), and two by a mixture of Arabs and Pakistanis.

Even the diagrams of “E” cell microcoulometer and electrochemical delay switches seemed banal beside the physics and chemistry manuals devoted to molecular matter, the thermal expansion of gases and fluid pressures.

Yet it was the studies of rocket fuel, thrust capabilities and concept models of a missile with radar stealth ability and load capacity to a speed of mach 2.4 that were most unnerving for the layman. Some were written on headed paper from the Hotel Grand in Peshawar, others from the Pearl Continental in Karachi; most on blank paper or in log books. They were extensive, precise, extremely detailed: the work of a man or men with highly advanced scientific and design understanding.

The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension but there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction.

This was only what was left behind by frightened men escaping the advance of the Mujahidin. The sensitive material is still with them.

Thanks for posting the scariest news that I have ever read!

With this information, we now must kill every Taliban member, al-Qaeda member, those who have financed and provided shelter to these Islamic terrorists and of course OBL, Omar, their scientists and the rest of the Islamic Terrorists in other Islamic states. We must not leave a single one of these Islamic asps to plot more violence on us!

It has been very obvious that GW and Tony have known about this for a long time. They have shown this data to the other leaders of the free world, and those leaders have joined our war on terrorism!

Time to declare war on al-Qaeda. Then kill all of these people and lock up all of their supporters in the US, the UK and Europe. Then try their supporters for sedition!

When one of our home grown supporters of OBL on the left or right supports OBL and the Islamic terrorists, it is time to take them out of the terror game that they are backing!

You are either with us or against us. No polite discussions or blurry exceptions!

They planned to kill as many of our children and grandchildren as possible. Now it is time to kill all who are associated with these Islamic terrorists who would use weapons of mass destruction on us! This is our Jihad, now!