Posted on 03/02/2003 9:28:11 AM PST by Indy Pendance
Khalid Sheik Mohammed keeps the terrorist business in the family. Before his arrest in Pakistan on Saturday, he was one of the last still in business.
Mohammed's nephew was convicted as the chief organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His older brother is regarded as a key member of Al Qaida. Yet another brother was killed during a bomb blast in Pakistan connected to Al Qaida.
The man widely regarded as mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured Saturday in a raid in Pakistan involving U.S. agents, officials told Associated Press. Mohammed had a price on his head. The United States was offering up to $25 million for information leading to his capture.
Rather, Mohammed has been linked to a 1995 terrorist plot to bomb or hijack airliners bound from Asia to the United States. Therein may lie the key to the Sept. 11 conspiracy.
Mohammed is regarded as a core member of Al Qaida, whose importance has grown in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that destroyed the group's infrastructure. The core group is believed to consist of about a dozen members, include Osama Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Zawahiri, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, the son of the blind sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, regarded as the guide for the 1993 WTC attack and other terrorist plots.
Mohammed might hate the United States but he has a lot to thank this country for. Born in Kuwait to a Pakistani mother, Mohammed left the sheikdom for the United States as a young student in the early 1980s. He studied in North Carolina and received a degree in engineering. One school he is believed to have attended is Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C.
When he completed his education, Mohammed, at the urging of his older brother, Zayed, embarked on his career in jihad. By 1989, he was in Afghanistan where he joined Saudi fugitive Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban protectors to fight the Soviets. The United States helped the Taliban effort although it is not known whether the CIA maintained links to Mohammed.
By 1992, the world had changed. The Soviet Union was out of Afghanistan, Kuwait was conquered by Iraq and then liberated. Mohammed decided to stay in Afghanistan and join Bin Laden's campaign against America.
At first, Mohammed was not a marked man. He kept a low profile as he worked with his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Under the guidance of his brother and nephew, Mohammed graduated to become what intelligence analysts term a third-tier Al Qaida operative. His forte was logistics and recruitment.
Two years later, Mohammed and Yousef returned to plan a series of attacks on airliners leaving from Pakistan and other Asian countries to the United States. The plot was foiled and Yousef, who assembled the bombs, was captured in Pakistan and extradited to the United States, where he is now serving a life sentence. Mohammed escaped arrest.
U.S. officials believe Mohammed is the link between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the skyscraper's destruction eight years later. They said Al Qaida regarded the 1993 bombing as a technical failure and had planned to try again to destroy the twin towers. Mohammed was said to have helped organize the mission to hijack passenger jets and crash them into the World Trade Center.
Today, Mohammed is believed to be part of a small group of Al Qaida survivors who have embarked on a strategy for post 9/11. The strategy calls for the launching of tactical terrorist strikes in U.S.-backed regimes already racked by unrest in an attempt to overthrow them. They include Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Tunisia. Mohammed's expertise is Pakistan and he could have been involved in the Al Qaida car bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi last June 14.
In the meantime, U.S. officials said, Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri are planning a major attack meant to top 9/11.
U.S. officials believed Mohammed was roaming the lawless Afghan-Pakistani border. What they were most concerned about was the connections Mohammed has maintained with Islamic insurgents in the United States. Almost all of the people that he and Yousef recruited were Egyptian-born American citizens, some of whom had easy access to the U.S. military.
He also attended A & T (traditionally a mostly Black college) in Greensboro, N.C. although I'm not sure where he got his engineering degree.
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