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Asian odyssey took al-Qa'ida money to JI - War on Terror
Kimina Lyall, * Southeast Asia correspondent
The Weekend Australian
LOCALPHOTOTABLE; Pg. 12
December 14, 2002, Saturday

LATE in the evening of September 10, 2001, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah boarded a flight from Karachi to Hong Kong.

Jabarah's immediate director was Khalid Shiek Mohammed, a Pakistani who has long been known as a key al-Qa'ida figure and who has in recent months become one of the world's most wanted men.

His journey, which would eventually take him to Malaysia, The Philippines and Singapore before his final arrest in Oman seven months later, had nothing -- and everything -- to do with the planned terror attacks on the US scheduled for the following day.

On board with him was $US10,000 in cash, which he was to deliver to a then-unknown group, Jemaah Islamiah, operating out of southeast Asia and planning to launch another team of suicide attackers in the wake of the September 11 catastrophe.

Jabarah, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian, had been plucked as a key member of the mission after he had met Osama bin Laden in July that year.

The al-Qa'ida leader had been impressed by the young recruit's excellent language skills and high performance in terror training courses.

But Jabarah's immediate director was Khalid Shiek Mohammed, a Pakistani who has long been known as a key al-Qa'ida figure and who has in recent months become one of the world's most wanted men.

In Pakistan, Khalid had given Jabarah the cash and instructions. Considered too valuable to be used as a suicide missile himself, Jabarah was to serve instead as a courier between al-Qa'ida and JI. He would also become a key decision-maker.

His name also would later be connected with JI's "plan B" -- the blasts in Bali in October -- after the group's first big plan fell through When he was in Karachi, Jabarah had another key meeting, with Hambali, who was using the alias Azman.

Hambali gave him the names of three locals he would work with in the region: Faiz Abu Bakar Bafana, Azzam and Fathur Roman Al-Ghozi. Two of those three, along with Jabarah, are now in custody in separate countries. Little is known about the third, Azzam.

From the time Jabarah landed in Hong Kong in September, until he fled Asia in December, he achieved a remarkable amount. He flew first to Kuala Lumpur, where he offloaded his cash. Then he went to Manila, where he met Al-Ghozi, an Indonesian who travelled on false Philippines passports. Known to JI members simply as "Sammy" and "Mike", Jabarah and Al-Ghozi cased the US and Israeli embassies in Manila. But, after deciding there were not enough Israelis working at the Manila mission, and the US embassy was too well-guarded, they turned their sights to Singapore.

The Sammy and Mike team split up and travelled to Singapore in October last year separately to avoid suspicion.

There they linked with the Singaporean members of JI, and began to videotape potential targets, including the strip of Napier Street where the Australian, US and British missions sit side by side. A copy of the taped targets would be found in an abandoned al-Qa'ida house in Afghanistan the following month.

Hambali and Jabarah gradually developed a clear plan. The suicide team would explode seven trucks containing 21 tonnes of ammonium nitrate outside the Australian, US, Israeli and British embassies in the tiny city-state of Singapore.

Jabarah kept an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, and in December last year he met again with Hambali and the unknown Azzam there to fine-tune the plan. But suddenly, news came of sweeping arrests in Singapore.

The arrests followed disclosure from a local cell member, who had revealed all to the Special Branch. Since then, more than 100 JI members have been detained in Singapore and Malaysia under those countries' internal security acts. Hearing of the arrests through an email message, Jabarah fled to the Middle East. Hambali found his way first to Thailand, conducting a key meeting with Jabarah in a house rented by Jabarah's wife near the Thai-Malaysia border.

He then caught a boat from Penang to Medan, in Indonesia.

Thai officials were tracking him at the time and missed him by a "whisker".

One month later, as The Australian revealed yesterday, Hambali returned to Bangkok, meeting with JI's spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, and other cell members. There, they identified Bali as a potential new target.

It was not until Jabarah's arrest in April in Oman, where he was helping al-Qa'ida members escape Afghanistan, that the extent of al-Qa'ida's involvement in the Singapore plot became clear to intelligence officers.

US authorities -- who have spent the past six months interrogating Jabarah in a secret apartment in the US -- have uncovered previously unknown direct links between al-Qa'ida's worldwide and Asian operations.

After extensive interviews with intelligence officers based in the region, including access to secret documents, The Weekend Australian has learned that the US now believes the great clue to those links is Khalid Shiek Mohammed.

Khalid's name is not new to anti-terror agents. The uncle of the 1993 World Trade Centre bomber, Ramzi Yousef, Khalid had first popped up in the mid-1990s in The Philippines, where he is believed to be the mastermind of a plot that would have seen suicide agents hijack 12 American airliners. That plan -- codenamed Bojinka, a Bosnian word for explosion -- was foiled in 1995 when the Manila apartment where Yousef and his WTC associate, Abdul Hakim Murad, were working, caught fire.

Inside, investigators found computers detailing the planned attacks. Murad was arrested when he returned to retrieve his laptop. Yousef was caught in Pakistan the following year. Both are now serving life sentences in the US.

It was Murad's interrogation by Philippines officers, however, that alerted agents to Khalid. Murad, who trained as a pilot in the US and boasted to interrogators he first had the plan to "dive (a plane) into the CIA building", met Khalid in July 1993 in Karachi.

Pakistan-born Khalid spent 1994 in The Philippines where he acted like anything but a committed jihadist. He was a regular at Manila's infamous Firehouse girlie bar.

Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza, who led the Bojinka investigation, said: "He is very clever, a highly covert individual. This could have been him creating himself a covert identity."