-->9/11 Mastermind: Plan Involved 10 Planes


By JOHN SOLOMON
The Associated Press
Sunday, September 21, 2003; 7:21 PM

WASHINGTON - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11
attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with
Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five
commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times,
according to interrogation reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

Mohammed also
divulged that, in its final
stages, the hijacking plan
called for as many as 22
terrorists and four planes
in a first wave, followed
by a second wave of
suicide hijackings that
were to be aided
possibly by al-Qaida
allies in southeast Asia,
according to the reports.

Over time, bin Laden
scrapped various parts of
the Sept. 11 plan, including attacks on both coasts and hijacking or bombing
some planes in East Asia, Mohammed is quoted as saying in reports that
shed new light on the origins and evolution of the plot of Sept. 11, 2001.

Addressing one of the questions raised by congressional investigators in their
Sept. 11 review, Mohammed said he never heard of a Saudi man named
Omar al-Bayoumi who provided some rent money and assistance to two
hijackers when they arrived in California.

Congressional investigators have suggested Bayoumi could have aided the
hijackers or been a Saudi intelligence agent, charges the Saudi government
vehemently deny. The FBI has also cast doubt on the congressional theory
after extensive investigation and several interviews with al-Bayoumi.

In fact, Mohammed claims he did not arrange for anyone on U.S. soil to
assist hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi when they arrived in
California. Mohammed said there"were no al-Qaida operatives or facilitators
in the United States to help al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi settle in the United
States," one of the reports state.

Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were on the plane that was flown into the
Pentagon.

Mohammed portrays those two hijackers as central to the plot, and even
more important than Mohammed Atta, initially identified by Americans as the
likely hijacking ringleader. Mohammed said he communicated with al-Hazmi
and al-Mihdhar while they were in the United States by using Internet chat
software, the reports states.

Mohammed said al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were among the four original
operatives bin Laden assigned to him for the plot, a significant revelation
because those were the only two hijackers whom U.S. authorities were
frantically seeking for terrorist ties in the final days before Sept. 11.

U.S. authorities continue to investigate the many statements that Mohammed
has made in interrogations, seeking to eliminate deliberate misinformation. But
they have been able to corroborate with other captives and evidence much of
his account of the Sept. 11 planning.

Mohammed told his interrogators the hijacking teams were originally made up
of members from different countries where al-Qaida had recruited, but that in
the final stages bin Laden chose instead to use a large group of young Saudi
men to populate the hijacking teams.

As the plot came closer to fruition, Mohammed learned"there was a large
group of Saudi operatives that would be available to participate as the muscle
in the plot to hijack planes in the United States," one report says Mohammed
told his captors.

Saudi Arabia was bin Laden's home, though it revoked his citizenship in the
1990s, and he reviled its alliance with the United States during the Gulf War
and beyond. Saudis have suggested for months that bin Laden has been
trying to drive a wedge between the United States and their kingdom, hoping
to fracture the alliance.

U.S. intelligence has suggested that Saudis were chosen, instead, because
there were large numbers willing to follow bin Laden and they could more
easily get into the United States because of the countries' friendly relations.

Mohammed's interrogation report states he told Americans some of the
original operatives assigned to the plot did not make it because they had
trouble getting into the United States.

Mohammed was captured in a March 1 raid by Pakistani forces and CIA
operatives in Rawalpindi. He is being interrogated by the CIA at an
undisclosed location.

He told interrogators about other terror plots that were in various stages of
planning or had been temporarily disrupted when he was captured, including
one planned for Singapore.

The sources who allowed AP to review the reports insisted that specific
details not be divulged about those operations because U.S. intelligence
continues to investigate some of the methods and search for some of the
operatives.

The interrogation reports make dramatically clear that Mohammed and
al-Qaida were still actively looking to strike U.S., Western and Israeli targets
across the world as of this year.

Mohammed told his interrogators he had worked in 1994 and 1995 in the
Philippines with Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin
Shah on the foiled Bojinka plot to blow up 12 Western airliners
simultaneously in Asia.

After Yousef and Murad were captured, foiling the plot in its final stages,
Mohammed began to devise a new plot that focused on hijackings on U.S.
soil.

In 1996, he went to meet bin Laden to persuade the al-Qaida leader"to give
him money and operatives so he could hijack 10 planes in the United States
and fly them into targets," one of the interrogation reports state.

Mohammed told interrogators his initial thought was to pick five targets on
each coast, but bin Laden was not convinced such a plan was practical, the
reports stated.

Mohammed said bin Laden offered him four operatives to begin with -
al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi as well as two Yemenis, Walid Muhammed bin
Attash and Abu Bara al-Yemeni.

"All four operatives only knew that they had volunteered for a martyrdom
operation involving planes," one report stated.

Mohammed said the first major change to the plans occurred in 1999 when
the two Yemeni operatives could not get U.S. visas. Bin Laden then offered
him additional operatives, including a member of his personal security detail.
The original two Yemenis were instructed to focus on hijacking planes in East
Asia.

Mohammed said through the various iterations of the plot, he considered
using a scaled-down version of the Bojinka plan that would have bombed
commercial airliners, and that he even"contemplated attempting to down the
planes using shoes bombs," one report said.

The plot, he said, eventually evolved into hijacking a small number of planes
in the United States and East Asia and either having them explode or crash
into targets simultaneously, the reports stated.

By 1999, the four original operatives picked for the plot traveled to
Afghanistan to train at one of bin Laden's camps. The focus, Mohammed
said, was on specialized commando training, not piloting jets.

Mohammed's interrogations have revealed the planning and training of
operatives was extraordinarily meticulous, including how to blend into
American society, read telephone yellow pages, and research airline
schedules.

A key event in the plot, Mohammed told his interrogators, was a meeting in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, that included al-Mihdhar,
al-Hazmi and other al-Qaida operatives. The CIA learned of the meeting
beforehand and had it monitored by Malaysian security, but it did not realize
the significance of the two eventual hijackers until just before the attacks.

The interrogation reports state bin Laden further trimmed Mohammed's plans
in spring 2000 when he canceled the idea for hijackings in East Asia, thus
narrowing it to the United States. Bin Laden thought"it would be too difficult
to synchronize" attacks in the United States and Asia, one interrogation
report quotes Mohammed as saying.

Mohammed said around that time he reached out to an al-Qaida linked group
in southeast Asia known as Jemaah Islamiyah. He began"recruiting JI
operatives for inclusion in the hijacking plot as part of his second wave of
hijacking attacks to occur after Sept. 11," one summary said.

Jemaah Islamiyah's operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin Hambali, had
attended part of the January 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur but Mohammed
said he was there at that time only because"as a rule had had to be informed"
of events in his region. Later, Hambali's operative began training possible
recruits for the second wave, according to the interrogation report.

One of those who received training in Malaysia before coming to the United
States was Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of conspiring with
the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui has denied being part of the Sept. 11 plot,
and U.S. and foreign intelligence officials have said he could have been set for
hijacking a plane in a later wave of attacks.

© 2003 The Associated Press

--><font color=#FF0000>Asia Times Report states that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was killed in a raid in October 2002</font>

A chilling inheritance of terror
by Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asian Times, 22 October 2002.
www.globalresearch.ca 3 March 2003
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SHA303A.html


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KARACHI - Ever since the frenzied shootout last month on September 11 in Karachi there have been doubts over whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, <font color=#FF0000>the self-proclaimed</font> <font color=#0000FF>[und ich erkläre mich jetzt einfach auch mal so en passant zum neuen Chef von, Alk-A-Selzer, Prost!]</font> head of al-Qaeda's military committee, <font color=#FF0000>died in the police raid on his apartment.</font>

Certainly, another senior al-Qaeda figure, Ramzi Binalshibh, <font color=#0000FF>[das ist der andere Monster-"Terrorist", von dem es auch keinerlei überzeugenden Beweis dafür gibt, dass die USA in wirklich haben!!! ]</font> 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 <font color=#FF0000>somewhere</font> in the Gulf. <font color=#0000FF>[ oder besser: somewhere in the Dreamland movie studios ;-) ]</font>

<font color=#FF0000>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.</font>

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 <font color=#FF0000>surprise</font>, the raiders learned that Ramzi Binalshibh had been netted in the swoop. And nothing further was said of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

<font color=#FF0000>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.</font> 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. <font color=#FF0000>News of the death of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was intentionally suppressed</font> 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.


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