Arrest may silence critics of war on terrorism

By PHIL REEVES

The US badly needed a big victory in its war on al Qaeda to counter those critics who say the violent and fanatically anti-Western network is a far greater and more immediate threat to Americans than Iraq.

And now, just as its generals and Pentagon strategists apply the finishing touches to their plans to invade Baghdad, America says this is precisely what it has secured.

With immaculate timing, Pakistani agents who have been working with the CIA and FBI have caught a man who is, by their account, almost as important as Osama bin Laden.

The alleged mastermind of the September 11 atrocities that set off the global crisis, he is a man of such criminal genius that - according to the Washington Post - he is known within the counter-intelligence world merely as "The Brain".

Almost every big attack against Americans and their allies by Islamic extremists over the past decade has been linked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan at the weekend and spirited off to a secret location.

Mohammed has been described by the White House as the central planner of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and a "key al Qaeda planner".

He has been referred to by others as al Qaeda's chief military operations officer, a conduit for money, people and plans throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.

There have been suggestions that Mohammed was involved in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, in which 224 people were killed.

Intelligence agents in the Philippines believe he was part of a cell that plotted to kill the Pope in 1995.

His name has been linked with the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in which 17 American sailors were killed in 2000.

His was the hand that allegedly drew the knife across the throat of a terrified Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and killed in Karachi as he was investigating Islamic extremist groups.

He has, it is said, 27 aliases, speaks five languages, and is - say the Americans - as smooth and unruffled in a sleazy nightclub or a restaurant in North Carolina, where he studied engineering in Chowan College, as he is in a staunchly conservative Islamic home in Pakistan.

If all these allegations are true - and it remains a significant "if" - he is about as breathtakingly ruthless and sinister as they come, a man with the blood of thousands of people on his hands and a US$25 million ($45 million) reward on his head.

His "career" makes intriguing reading, although it is important to note that much of the details have been made public by the tireless but unnamed "US sources" who have an interest in presenting their catch as a very big fish.

He was born in Kuwait 37 years ago, the fourth son of Sheikh Mohammed Ali, a prominent preacher at the al-Ahmadi mosque. But the family come from the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, the wild lands bordering Afghanistan which are a hotbed of hardline Islamic anti-Westernism.

While still in his teens in Kuwait, he is said to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 and the largest international Islamist organisation.

In 1983, he went to Chowan to study, where he is remembered for being highly intelligent and rigidly conservative, and for keeping his distance from non-Muslims and non-Arabs. He was soon raising money for the CIA-funded Afghan "jihad" against the occupying Soviets by selling second-hand clothes.

Six months after graduating in mechanical engineering, he is believed to have moved to Peshawar in north-western Pakistan, where he later linked up with bin Laden.

According to the Financial Times, which has investigated his career in detail, he devoted himself to the Afghan mujahideen for five years.

Mohammed is related to Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who is serving life in Florida, for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre - another attack some have linked to Mohammed. A lorry bomb which killed 21 people outside a Tunisian synagogue last April has also been linked to him.

According to the New York Times, Mohammed's importance within al Qaeda did not become clear to American investigators for some months after September 11, when his name began to emerge during interrogations with al Qaeda operatives as a crucial player, and possibly the link between the 19 hijackers and the network's leadership.

Last year, the joint congressional inquiry into the terror attacks was critical of the CIA for not recognising his importance within al Qaeda before the attacks.

He had first come to the attention of the CIA and FBI six years earlier, as a member of a small group of militants, including Ramzi Yousef, in the Philippines. They were behind a plan to simultaneously bomb 11 US airliners around the Pacific. This was thwarted by a fire in the group's apartment in Manila.

By the late 1990s Mohammed was in Afghanistan and, it appears, planning the biggest atrocity of them all.

According to the Financial Times, he played a part in the intricate financial arrangements for the 19 hijackers. A central figure in that planning was Mustafa Ahmed Aden al-Hawsawi - the man to whom three of the hijackers wired a total of US$25,000 of unneeded funds just before they went to their deaths.

Bank records showed that Hawsawi had an extra Visa card, in another name. When investigators saw the photo ID taken for the application form for the card, they saw the face of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed.

- INDEPENDENT