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A chilling inheritance of
terror
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Ever since the frenzied shootout last
month on September 11 in Karachi there have been doubts
over whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed
head of al-Qaeda's military committee, died in the
police raid on his apartment.
Certainly, another
senior al-Qaeda figure, Ramzi Binalshibh, widely
attributed as being the coordinator of the September 11
attacks on the United States a year earlier, was taken
alive and handed over to the US. The latest information
is that he is on a US warship somewhere in the Gulf.
Now it has emerged that Kuwaiti national Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed did indeed perish in the raid, but his
wife and child were taken from the apartment and handed
over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in
whose hands they remain.
Sources close to
Pakistani intelligence agents say that the wife, under
intense interrogation, has revealed information that is
likely to lead to a new crackdown in Pakistan, as well
as in Southeast Asia.
After the Taliban and
al-Qaeda were routed in Afghanistan at the end of 2001,
many fled to Pakistan to regroup and set up new cells.
One of these, as described in Asia Times Online, From
the al-Qaeda puzzle, a picture emerges, was in
Karachi, with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as its head.
Despite being tracked by informers within
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, who has been described as "probably the
only man who knows all the [al-Qaeda] pieces of the
puzzle", always managed to remain one step ahead of any
raiding parties in the slum areas along the coastal belt
of Karachi.
However, it was then learned that
Shaikh Mohammed had established connections with some
local groups, including underworld figures, to entrench
his cell. Using highly sensitive equipment, in April a
call was tracked to someone by the name of Arif, living
in the densely populated southwestern part of the city.
Arif spoke to a Tunisian, passing on a message from
Shaikh Mohammed. Subsequently, the Tunisian is believed
to be the man who rammed a truck laden with explosives
into a Jewish synagogue in Djerba in Tunisia in which
many French and German citizens died.
After this
suicide attack, the FBI were onto Shaikh Mohammed in a
big way, and, no doubt not entirely without coincidence,
on September 11 they decided on a showdown at the
apartment of Shaikh Mohammed, his wife and child, in the
Defense Housing Authority near Korangi Road. A number of
Arabs were also living in the apartment at the time.
Initially, the joint ISI-FBI plan was to take
Shaikh Mohammed alive so that he could be grilled,
especially as he was believed to have knowledge of other
al-Qaeda cells in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and
elsewhere. However, as a plainclothed officer climbed
the stairs toward the third-floor apartment, a hand
grenade was thrown, and he retreated. Reinforcements
then arrived, and for the next few hours a fierce gun
battle blazed.
The FBI, still keen to take Shaikh
Mohammed alive, teargassed the area, and a number of
people were captured. However, despite instructions to
the contrary, a few Pakistan Rangers entered the flat,
where they found Shaikh Mohammed and another man,
allegedly with their hands up. The Rangers nevertheless
opened fire on the pair.
Later, the Pakistani
press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on
the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of
Kalma, in Arabic: "There is no God except Allah,
Mohammed is his messenger"). An official who was present
in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia
Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh
Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained from
him.
Subsequently, to their surprise, the
raiders learned that Ramzi Binalshibh had been netted in
the swoop. And nothing further was said of Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed.
But now it emerges that an Arab woman
and a child were taken to an ISI safe house, where they
identified the Shaikh Mohammed's body as their husband
and father. The body was kept in a private NGO mortuary
for 20 days before being buried, under the surveillance
of the FBI, in a graveyard in the central district of
Karachi.
The widow subsequently underwent
exhaustive interrogation in the custody of FBI
officials, during which she revealed details of people
who visited her husband, and of his other contacts and
plans. News of the death of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was
intentionally suppressed so that officials could play on
the power of his name to follow up leads and contacts.
From this it emerges that, in particular, Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed was in close contact with the Rabitatul
Mujahideen, an alliance formed by Indonesia's Jemaah
Islamiyah to act as a central committee for leaders of
the various militant groups in Southeast Asia. He was
also in touch with dissident groups within the
Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistani-based militant group that
has been active in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in
Indian-administered Kashmir, and another Pakistani
militia, the Ansarul Islam.
Intelligence
officials now believe that through these links a new
wave of terror will be unleashed - and officials have
already taken the precaution to warn the intelligence
agencies of friendly countries to check the lists of all
people who have undergone flight training in the past
six months: They have been led to believe that another
World Trade Center/Pentagon attack is being planned,
although not on a target in the US.
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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