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Arrest of Khalid: Another of Hydra's
heads?
By B Raman
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.
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