Posted on 08/15/2002 4:07:16 PM PDT by knighthawk
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.
I believe Hamid Karzai, the acting Afghan president, appointed Dostum Deputy Minister of Defense after the interim government was installed.
I still don't understand why Bin Laden didn't have a series of follow-up attacks planned. We were primed for panic and chaos. At the very least, I expected an attack on the Saudi royal family (car bombings, etc.).
Gee, really!
Also check this out:
Osama was reputed to have been named Minister of Defense shortly before 9/11.
He knows how to kill civilians, but fighting a war was not his forte. The NA fairly easily repulsed the Taliban - before the US and Russia stepped in big time.
And he had no clue about air power, and the will to fight back. Stuck in jihadi dreams, rather than the realities of the world.
Or else he's stuck in Hell (which may be the same thing)
Perhaps he did and they were foiled or otherwise prevented due to our military response and security clampdown. We'll probably never know. We were primed for panic and chaos.
I agree. Another large-scale attack and this country would have been locked down for weeks. Look at all the panic that was generated with those anthrax attacks. Offices and buildings were being evacuated so often due to suspicious letters last fall that it was becoming routine. My own office building was evacuated twice due to suspicious looking letters that turned out to be nothing at all.
It wasn't just buildings. We flew from Atlanta to San Antonio in October. We boarded the plane and a few minutes later a firetruck pulled up behind us with its lights on (I told my wife, "this doesn't look good"). After about 30 minutes we had to de-plane because they found the dreaded "white powdery substance" in the aft galley. Three hours later we finally got airborne (in a different jet). I'm sure it was dust or sugar.
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