| Investigators searched the house and found photographs of Osama bin Laden as a young man fighting in Afghanistan, In the same haul, some investigators say, were photographs of Zahid and Khaled with close associates of Nawaz Sharif, twice Pakistan's prime minister in the 1990s. Even with US and Pakistani investigators on their trail, Zahid al-Sheikh and his nephew Ramzi Yousef must have felt confident that their ties to senior Pakistani Islamists, whose power had been cemented within the country's intelligence service, would prove invaluable.
Later in Karachi, Yousef appears to have teamed up with the man who was to become his patron. Operating an import-export company from an office in Pakistan's commercial capital, the man was known by a variety of names, including Munir Ibraihim Alimed, Munir Madni and Abdul Magid Madni. He was, of course, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. According to an investigation by the writer Simon Reeve, the company imported bottled holy water from Mecca. Over a three-month period in 1993 a friend of Yousef's, a pilot from Dubal by the name of Abdel Hakim Murad, met on at least three occasions with Yousef in Karachi along with a veteran of the Afghan war, Wali Kihan Amin Shah, and Khaled Sheikh, who on these occasions was using the name Abdel Magid. The subject of flying came up more than once. "Magid is a kind of person who is very much interested in pilot training," Murad would later tell investigators. In September 1993, after treatment in both Pakistan and Iran for injuries suffered when a bomb concoction he was mixing exploded, Yousef gave Murad 18 days of explosives training in preparation for their next assignment. Their destination: the Philippines. Just before Adriatico Street meets General Quirino Avenue on its long progress from Manila Bay, there is a nightspot with an unusual attraction. On the roof of the Unplugged Acoustics bar and restaurant a light aircraft has been mounted, as if it had crashed there. Just around the corner, the two Arab men who booked into a small room at the Josefa Apartrnents on Quirino Avenue, might have regarded the aeroplane an apt memento of the deadly plots they hatched while they resided in the Philippines' capital. On December 8 1994, Edith Guerrera, a stylish, confident businesswoman with bright lipstick and a winning smile, laughed with her reception manager when the two guests asked for a second registration form to fill out for their apartment. "Perhaps they have forgotten their names," the women joked, as one of the men tore up the first form and filled out the new one they had given him. "Naji Haddad" and his accomplice paid 40,000 pesos up front in addition to a one-month deposit 80,000 pesos in all before taking the lift to the sixth floor, where a sign on the landing demands "Silence" They checked into room 603, which had been booked in advance. The mistake over the hotel registration forms was untypical. The normally meticulous Ramzi Yousef was not a man given to forgetting his alias. With him was Abdel Hakim Murad, his pilot friend. They had both arrived in the Philippines earlier in the year, Yousef having spent time training Muslim rebels on the southern island of Mindanao. They chose the room for its fine view over General Quirino Avenue, the four-lane road that leads down to where the waves of the South China Sea lap against ships moored off the quayside of Manila Bay. "They gave me the impression that they were here to study," said Mrs Guerrera. "They looked like students. They double locked the door when they were inside or out. They didn't ask the room boy to clear up the room." They brought boxes into the building, she added. Inside the boxes, it later transpired, were chemicals bought from a variety of suppliers in Manila and Quezon City, from which Yousef concocted explosives. Yousef and Murad's activities in Manila were financed by Khaled Sheikh through a company called Konsonjaya, an import-export operation dealing in Sudanese honey and other commodities and based in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. Among the directors was the operational head of Jemaah Islamiah, the south-east Asian regional Islamist network, a man called Riduan Isammudin but whom the intelligence world knows better as 'Hambali". It was not, however, all work and no play for Yousef and Murad. They were regulars at two karaoke bars the XO on Adriatico Street and the Firehouse on Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City. Murad later said the one place they never went while they were in Manila was a mosque. According to Philippines police records, Arminda Costudio, a waitress at the smart Manila Bay Club on Roxas Boulevard in those days, remembered being introduced to a man called Salem Ali, described as a "rich businessman from Qatar". He always seemed to be with Yousef, she said. Her description of him is the same as Murad's descriplion of Abdel Magid. Both referred to his having "excess meat" on his ring finger. She remembered specifically meeting "Salem Ali" twice at the Shangri-La hotel in Makati in mid-1994, where he wore a white tuxedo and paid for dinner with a wad of cash while giving out candies to the gathering. He had a girlfriend called Rose Mosquera, who worked at a bar in Quezon City. Yousef's girlfriend Carol Santiago, whom he met at a Seven-Eleven store on Adriatico Street, said that she was introduced to a "Saudi businessman" by the name of Salem Ali. Arminda was the girlfriend of Wali Khan Amin Shah, the Afghan war veteran who was in on the plotting back in Karachi. He had subsequently joined the others in Manila. Meanwhile Khaled Sheilth travelled widely, as far as Brazil on at least one occasion, promoting the business enterprises he and the south-east Asia cell and the members of the Konsonjaya company were developing as a means of sustaining their terror enterprise. This gave Yousef time to both play and plot. Murad told investigators that at around that time be had sparked an idea in Yousefs mind: why not crash a plane into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia? "OK, we will think about it," Yousef replied, according to Murad's account, before heading off with Khaled Sheikh for a scuba diving course at the resort of Puerto Galera, south of Manila. This did not mean Yousef was in any way unconscientious when it came to his life's work. Murad said Yousef was responsible for a string of bomb attacks in Manila: the Miss Universe pageant and an attack on Roxas Boulevard, both on May 21 1994, a blast near a Wendy's Hamburger restaurant on November 13, and the bombing of the Greenbelt theatre on December 1.
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Later that month he carried a small bomb aboard Philippine Airlines flight PR434 from Manila to the island of Cebu. He left the flight during a stopover, leaving the bomb under a seat later occupied by a 24-year-old Japanese engineer, Haruki Ikegami. Two hours into the next stage of the flight the bomb exploded. A stewardess used a blanket to cover where Mr Ikegami's legs had been as the aircraft descended and managed to land safely. Mr Ikegami died in agony. Today, Japanese tourists visiting Manila often ask Edith Guerrera, owner of the Josefa apartments, if they can rent room 603, to get a feel for the man who killed Mr Ikegami. "They say they are curious," said Mrs Guerrera. The bomb on flight PR434 appears to have been a dry run for a more spectacular act of terror, known among the plotters as "Bojinka", which means loud noise in Serbo-Croat. Yousefs plan was to place bombs on 11 trans-Pacific airliners en route to the United States, timed to go off simultaneously. But such was Yousefs devotion to his task that the Bojinka plot was not the only one he was working on. It was also the reason he and Murad enjoyed the excellent views over General Quirmno Avenue. In mid-January 1995, on a visit to the Philippines, Pope John Paul was due to pass beneath. On the night of January 6, however, other residents of the complex complained about a smell coming from apartment 603 and Mrs Guerrera called the fire brigade. After trying to tell the fire officers to leave them alone, Yousef and Murad fled and the plot to kill the Pope was uncovered. Later, Murad was nabbed when he returned to retrieve a laptop computer from the apartment. Yousef escaped, as did Wall Khan Amin Shah, though he was later arrested in Malaysia. But among the array of documents found in the apartrnent was a letter which hinted that while Ramzi Yousef had been obsessively indulging his love of chemistry, another player in the group's awful game of terror was also at work The letter was signed: "Khaled Sheikh Bojinka". Yousef made his way back to Pakistan. But before he could rebase himself in Peshawar as intended, a team of FBI, US Diplomatic Security Service and Pakistani officers swarmed into the Su-Casa guest-house in Islamabad on February 7, a month after he had evaded the Philippines security net, and took him away. America's most wanted man later told a New York court: "I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it." Yousef is now in the world's most secure jail, the "supermax" in Florence, Colorado. But the man who signed the Bojinka letter, whose wads of cash and white tuxedo had impressed the women of Manila, disappeared. As was his pattern, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed looked around carefully for somewhere he could feel at home and remain out of the limelight. He made his way to Qatar, the tiny Gulf state where Sheikh Abdullali bin Khaled al-Thani, minister of religious endowments, had "taken it upon himself", in the words of a western diplomat, to welcome about 100 "Arab Afghans" some years earlier. Khaled Sheikh arrived from Manila and was put up in a private guesthouse at the police academy in the Qatari capital Doha. He was given a post in the ministry of public works, though under an assumed name, while continuing to travel abroad. But the net was closing in on him. In 1996 the FBI learned of his presence in Qatar. The US authorities did not then know a lot about him, but he had been indicted for his role in the Bojinka plot. But when a squad of Qatari police was despatched on behalf of the FBI to the police academy where he had been staying, they arrived to find it had been cleaned, tidied and emptied. Khaled Mohammed was flying west on a private jet, tipped off in good time. His journey ended in Kandahar, among the massed ranks of the Taliban, at the heart of the extremist movement's power base in the southern Afghan city. The Taliban, born among Afghan exiles in theological schools in Pakistan, had won widespread popular support in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. In 1997 Khaled Mohammed's wife and children joined him there, and he started the process of incorporating himself into the world of Osama bin Laden, on the fringes of whose network he had lived and worked for more than a decade. Khaled Sheikh was able to offer bin Laden a ready-made terrorist infrastructure in south east Asia. Ramzi Yousef had built ties with the Philippine Islamists, the Abu Sayyaf group, to whom he had given instructions in bomb-making. Through his fellow director on the board of the Konsonjaya company, Hambali, he was able to extend al Qaeda's tentacles even deeper into the Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean and Thai Islamist movements. These had grouped around the region-wide Jemaah Islamiah (JI) organisation led by Hambali and the Indonesian preacher Abu Bakr Bashir. One key al Qaeda activist in the late-1990s was "Sammy", the nom-de-guerre of Mohamed Mansour Jabara, a Canadian Arab. Sammy, who was briefed on JI operations during meetings in Karachi with Hambali, had risen to prominence by coming top of his class in the al-Qaeda sniper school. He wanted to become a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden, but the al-Qaeda leader told him that because of his grasp of English and his clean Canadian passport, he would be useful operating in south east Asia, and introduced him to his new boss Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. By November 1999 Khaled Sheikh had also begun to face west. The germ of an idea which had been lingering in his mind for half a decade, was about to come to fruition. At a Kandahar guest house known as the Ghumad, Khaled Sheikh assembled his team, then relocated to the al-Qaeda camps at Khowst. Mohammed Atta emerged as the leader of this team, and for the next two years they were taken through their paces, guided and visited in Hamburg, their German base, by Khaled. In an interview in May 2002 with the Arab satellite television channel al-Jazeera, Khaled Sheikh gave an account of what had happened during that time: "About two and a half years prior to the holy raids on Washington and New York," he said, "the military committee held a meeting during which we decided to start planning for a martyrdom operation inside America." This was confirmed by Abu Zubeida, the head of the al-Qaeda training camps who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. Other information has led US investigators to conclude that Khaled Sheikh did indeed conceive of the most spectacular terrorist atrocity of all time. The meticulous planning included intricate financial arrangements that allowed the 19 hijackers to pay their way while in the US. Investigators established that a central figure in that planning was a certain Mustafa Ahmed Aden al-Hawsawi, an al-Qaeda activist then based in the United Arab Emirates who subsequently disappeared, probably to Karachi. It was to al-Hawsawi that three of the hijackers wired a total of Dollars 25,000 of unneeded funds just before they went to their deaths. Bank records showed that al-Hawsawi had a supplemental Visa cash card, which was in the name of Abdullah al-Fak'asi al-Ghamdi. When investigators saw the photo ID taken for the application form for the Visa card the face was that of none other than Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. That face has haunted investigators ever since. On September 11 2002, the man who had helped Khaled Sheikh plan the attacks and joined him in bragging about it in the interview on al-Jazeera television, Ramzi Binalshibh, was arrested in Karachi. Even though investigators believe he was probably in Karachi at that time, Khaled Sheikh evaded the dragnet, just as he had done so many times before. Today he is the man more than any other that intelligence officers from Canberra to Kuwait City, from Manila to Washington, want to track down. After the suicide bombing of German tourists at a Tunisian synagogue last March, German intelligence said the culprit - Nizar ben Mohammed Nawar had telephoned Khaled Sheikh three hours before the attack to inform him of progress, confirming his central role in al Qaeda's continued operations and his now legendary ability to evade capture. The south-east Asia team be had put in place also began plotting a series of bomb attacks against western embassies and personnel in Manila scheduled for December 2001, but then shifted in focus to Singapore, where the diplomatic missions were more accessible. Mohammed Mansour Jabara, the ace sniper who wanted to be bin Laden's bodyguard but was assigned instead to Khaled Sheikh, was the lynchpin of the plots. He directed Jemaah Islamiah cells - called Fiah under his nickname Sammy with an Indonesian bombmaker, "Mike", whose real name was Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. The Singapore plot was foiled when police there discovered video footage of the targets. Jabarab fled, but was arrested last March in Oman while en route to Pakistan to see his mentor. But his plotting was not in vain. The Jemaah Islamiah fiLnally managed to pull off the "big one" when three bombs slaughtered 190 people - most of them foreign tourists - on the Indonesian tourist haven of Bali on October 12, 2002. By the time of the Bali bombing, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had long disappeared. As al Qaeda gears up to exploit the insecurity expected to erupt if war breaks out in Iraq, its most illustrious planner is still out there. As evidence grows of new recruitment to extremist cells linked to al-Qaeda, it is the global vision and technical skill of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, now approaching his 38th birthday, that counter-terrorism officials believe will determine al-Qaeda's future direction. As one senior western intelligence officer put it: "He is said to have been one who does not have bright ideas of his own, but runs with other peoples' ideas as if they are his own. He is not only alb Qaeda's operational head, but he has his own financial links, and as long as he is at large, he is probably as great a threat as anybody else you can think of." |