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I'd say that you look for an attack on a personal target, for example an assassination, I believe that it was a day before September 11, but one of the commanders of the Northern Alliance was assassinated by the Taliban.

The Australian
August 16, 2002
By Kathy Gannon in Kabul

OSAMA bin Laden personally ordered the assassination of Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massood days before the September 11 attacks, a senior ex-Taliban official has said.

It is the first time a Taliban insider has discussed the terrorist mastermind's role.

Massood, the military chief of the northern alliance, was mortally wounded on September 9 when two suicide attackers posing as television reporters detonated a bomb during an interview in Khodja Bahauddin, in Takhar province.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, the former Taliban deputy interior minister, said bin Laden had ordered the two suicide bombers diverted from a trip to Indonesia and sent them on the mission.

Khaksar said that on September 9 he had gone to the home of Taliban Interior Minister Abdul Razzak to pay respects for the death of Razzak's father.

Razzak, who has eluded capture by the US-led coalition, had contacts with bin Laden, and two Saudis that Khaksar believed to be al-Qaeda members were at the wake.

Khaksar said the two Saudis, whom he did not identify, told him of bin Laden's role and assured him that Massood was dead. The northern alliance had withheld confirmation of his death for 48 hours until a successor could be chosen.

"They said 'no, believe me he is gone'," Khaksar said, referring to Massood.

"They also said that he was killed by two Arabs who were supposed to go to Indonesia but were ordered to go to Massood and kill him. The order came from Osama. He cancelled their trip to Indonesia."

The United States has said it believes bin Laden had foreknowledge of the plot to kill Massood, but has not said what level of involvement he had in the plot.

The assassins were travelling on Belgian passports, and in January police in Paris arrested two men for allegedly providing false documents to Massood's killers.

The French authorities believed the passports were stolen from the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg, France, or its embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.

There has been wide speculation that bin Laden may have killed Massood to ingratiate himself further with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar and ensure his protection if the Americans retaliated for the attacks he knew were only days away in the United States.

Khaksar said bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were among the mourners for Razzak's father, but they met the Taliban minister separately at a mansion on the grounds of the royal palace.

Although September 11 was only two days away, Khaksar said no one at the wake spoke of anything unusual in the works.

All of the talk had to do with the death of Massood, the Taliban's mortal enemy.

"No one talked about September 11 or said that anything was going to happen.

"I think that it was so secret that no one knew."

Khaksar, who broke with the Taliban after the fall of Kabul in November, said the Taliban leadership was convinced bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks. At the time, he said, al-Qaeda seemed invincible.