Bali
bomber may have been vital
link By Jacob Zenn
Like
Osama Bin Laden, he was one of the most wanted
international terrorists. And like the al-Qaeda
leader, he was discovered in the relative peace of
Abbottabad.
Umar Patek, the man who
masterminded the 2002 Bali bombing, was captured
by Pakistani forces on January 25 in the formerly
innocuous city just 60 kilometers north of the
capital Islamabad. Patek, a Yemeni who is also an
Indonesian national, trained in Afghanistan in the
1980s when Bin Laden was a mujahideen commander
against the Soviets. Their connection runs deep
and it may have been Patek's detention and vital
information from the 40-year-old terrorist suspect
that sealed the deal on Bin Laden's demise.
Abbottabad is neither located near the
Federally Administered
Tribal Areas of Pakistan where
Bin Laden was thought to be hiding and Taliban
support is strong, nor is the city of 100,000
people associated with the terrorist attacks
plaguing nearby Islamabad, and Peshawar and
Lahore.
Until Patek's capture and the US
Special Forces' swoop on Bin Laden's compound
three months later, Abbottabad was notable only
for the presence of the Pakistan Military Academy
- the equivalent of West Point in the United
States. The possibility that Patek and Bin Laden
were connected by one or more al-Qaeda
facilitators or couriers based in Abbottabad is a
plausible scenario.
Though less well known
internationally than Bin Laden, Patek was no less
lethal and no less committed to the killing of
innocents. An explosives expert and long-time
member of the regionally-mobile KOMPAK group
within Jemaah Islamiyah, he first made his name
through the Bali bombings, which killed more than
200 people, mostly tourists, in October 2002.
Patek "was one of the Indonesian citizens
who is known to be close to al-Qaeda leader, Osama
Bin Laden", an expert from the State Intelligence
Academy in Jakarta said after the capture. [1] Now
that Bin Laden is dead, Pakistan, which has been
holding Patek in confinement, may extradite Patek
to Indonesia.
For nine years after the
Bali bombing Patek, like Bin Laden, lived on the
run, often in southern Mindanao in the
Philippines, training terrorists from Abu Sayyaf
and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He evaded
the militaries of Indonesia, the Philippines and
the United States, despite a US$1 million American
bounty on his head.
Patek and Bin Laden
reunited? Patek was on a stopover in
Abbottabad on the way to North Waziristan or
Afghanistan to meet al-Qaeda's leadership, but his
stay in Abbottabad was more than merely temporary.
He had been in Abbottabad for two weeks before his
capture. Why was he in Pakistan, and specifically
Abbottabad, for so long? He very well may have
been trying to connect with Bin Laden, or at least
exchange messages with the al-Qaeda leader.
It appears that Bin Laden was living in
the mansion in Abbottabad where he was killed for
some time (at least since August 2010, but some
reports suggest it was built for him as early as
2006). Considering both Bin Laden and Patek's
position in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, they may
certainly have had mutual contacts in Abbottabad.
Otherwise, it is a great coincidence that
two of the world's most wanted terrorists were
hiding in the same city without either knowing
about the other. It could also be that
Abbottabad's location along the route from
Islamabad to North Waziristan and Afghanistan and
its relative security close to the homes of many
Pakistan military members made it the ideal
hideout and transit location. Regardless, Patek's
capture and Pakistan's announcement of that on
March 29 raises the question whether Bin Laden was
on alert that he might soon be next.
Connected by couriers? Patek
was captured with his wife hiding out on the
second floor of the home of the parents of an
al-Qaeda facilitator who worked as a clerk in a
post office in Abbottabad.
Pakistani
security forces detained the facilitator, Tahir
Shazad, in January when he picked up two French
militants who were intending to travel with Patek
to North Waziristan and Afghanistan at Lahore's
international airport. Pakistani intelligence,
with support from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), had placed Shazad under surveillance one
year before his capture when he was seen with an
Arab terror suspect.
The detainment of
Shazad led directly to the capture of Patek and
his wife, who were sheltered in the home of the
parents of a university student in Abbottabad
after the student invited the couple in as guests.
Pakistan security forces detained the student who
is still in custody.
The link to Bin
Laden's hideout was through a courier that the CIA
had been working on tracking for years. Could
Patek's facilitator and this courier have been
connected, and could Patek, Patek's facilitator,
or even Patek's wife, have revealed valuable
information to Pakistani intelligence that was
relayed to the US and became the game-changer in
President Barack Obama's decision to send in
special forces? If Pakistan had been monitoring
Patek's facilitator for about a year, the time
frame matches closely with Obama's statement that
he knew of Bin Laden's suspected hideout since
August 2010.
The lag in time between
Patek's actual capture on January 25 and
Pakistan's announcement on March 29 may have been
in order to prevent Bin Laden and his
collaborators from having enough time to plan to
relocate to another hideout. Any movement on Bin
Laden or his family's part would have required a
thorough plan as any exposure to the outside would
have placed them at risk of detection.
Naturally, the mansion where he was hiding
had no telephone access or Internet and no view in
from the outside. Even the balcony was hidden from
outside view because of the high walls surrounding
the perimeter.
Although it is unclear when
Bin Laden and his family first took residence in
Abbottabad, the al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership
may have purposely preserved the city’s relative
peace in order to not draw attention to Bin
Laden’s hideout. In fact, in April 2009, Taliban
fighters set up a base of operations 60 kilometers
northwest of Islamabad in the Kala Dhaka district
of Mansehra, which borders Abbottabad, but the
Taliban never crossed into or threatened
Abbottabad.
There have been reports since
9/11 that the Pakistan army and Pakistan's
intelligence agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), were helping to hide Bin
Laden. If he benefited from close contacts with
members of the Pakistani military, then it makes
sense that Bin Laden would be hiding in
Abbottabad, a city with more than 100,000 people,
as opposed to the remote and mountainous areas
along the Pakistan and Afghanistan border.
Another reason why Bin Laden may have
chosen Abbottabad is because the hideout is in a
relatively populated environment outside the area
of operation of US drones. In close proximity to
the Pakistan Military Academy and surrounded by
civilian neighborhoods, Abbottabad could have been
considered an unassuming, yet well-positioned
hideout.
As safe as Bin Laden may have
felt in Abbottabad, there have already been
several major terrorist captures in Islamabad and
other major cities in its vicinity: Ramzi Yousef
in Islamabad; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in
Rawalpindi; and Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad.
Presumably, these terrorists felt safer in cities
and, if they were under the partial protection of
the ISI, it was easier for the ISI to monitor them
in the urban environment. All have now been caught
and, except for Bin Laden who is dead, the rest
are in detention in the continental US or
Guantanamo.
When Pakistan announced
Patek's capture in March, the news contradicted
the consensus belief that Patek was hiding out in
Mindanao or Yemen. No prior reports tied Patek to
Pakistan. In fact, Patek was considered a primary
suspect in a Manila bus bombing as late as January
25, the same day he was actually captured in
Abbottabad.
He could have traveled to
Pakistan with forged documents between the time he
planned and ordered the bus bombing and January
25, but the fact that the Philippines officials
believed that he was a suspect in the bus bombing
and based in Mindanao shows how little they knew
about his whereabouts and how unexpected it was
that Patek was ultimately found in Pakistan on
January 25.
The Philippines officials were
not alone in their unawareness of Patek's
location. A terrorism expert from the
International Crisis Group said at a panel
discussion on radicalism in Jakarta on March 2,
2011, that she heard from "credible sources" that
Patek had recently been sighted in Yemen. [2]
Also, in March 2010 other experts believed that
Patek was hiding in Sulu province, Mindanao and in
2006 he was believed to have been killed in Sulu.
Coincidence or calculated? If both
Bin Laden's killing and Patek's capture did not
take place in the same city, under similar
circumstances, and in the same time frame, then it
would be hard to draw any connections between
Patek's capture and the gold mine in uncovering
Bin Laden's hideout. Patek could have simply been
transiting throughout Abbottabad and, despite
close connections with al-Qaeda in Abbottabad, not
known of Bin Laden's secret hideout.
However, that means that US intelligence
would have been more informed about Bin Laden than
Patek, who after all is an insider. If Patek did
know of Bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, then
it is not unlikely that Shazad, Patek's wife, or
Patek let the cat out of the bag during
interrogation. Patek may be an explosive expert,
but is not necessarily trained in
counter-interrogation techniques, let alone his
wife or Shazad.
There may be further
implications of Patek and Bin Laden's capture and
killing. Their terrorist web may unravel and lead
to more al-Qaeda captures and killings and more
al-Qaeda and Taliban attacks in retaliation. The
"war against terror" will go on for sure, but if
Patek and Bin Laden can go down in succession like
this, then Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda and Taliban
leaders must not be feeling too secure, no matter
where they are hiding.
Jacob Zenn is an
independent consultant in international security
in Washington, DC and a third-year law student in
Georgetown Law's Global Law Scholars program.
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