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The beat-up video camera was delivered to Afghanistan in a box, and picked up by two clean-shaven Arabs posing as journalists. They met with Osama bin Laden before leaving on their mission — to kill mujahedeen hero Ahmad Shah Massood. Five years after the Taliban opponent was slain by a bomb hidden in the camera, a former Taliban official on Saturday described how al-Qaida staged the killing — two days before the Sept. 11 attack on America — hoping to strike a fatal blow to the pro-U.S. Northern Alliance. Waheed Mozhdah, director of the then-Taliban Foreign Ministry's Middle East and...

Terror suspect linked to Afghan assassination October 28, 2003 - 9:11AM A Frenchman under investigation in Australia and France for possible terrorist activities was also suspected of links to the assassination of an Afghan leader, authorities said. Willie Virgile Brigitte, 35, is in custody in a Paris area jail where he is being held on suspicion of association with a terror group, French police and justice officials said. Investigations are under way in France and Australia into Brigitte's alleged links to the al-Qaeda terror network, French officials said today. A judicial official said that Brigitte was also suspected of running...

Mission to Capture or Kill al Qaeda Leader Frustrated by Near Misses, Political Disputes First of two articles.The seeds of the CIA's first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt -- for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1993. For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center asked the...

France has deported a Tunisian man to his homeland despite protests that he could face torture there. Adel Tebourski, 42, was put on an Air France flight back to Tunisia on Monday, officials said. Tebourski had served a jail sentence in France after being convicted of helping the killers of Afghan resistance leader Ahmed Shah Masood in 2001. The French authorities described Tebourski as a serious threat to national security. French campaigners have said he could be tortured in Tunisia, and the UN torture committee last month called on Paris to suspend his deportation, the French news agency AFP reports....

Breaking on KDKA radio Pittsburgh...Afghanistan President Karzai's VP pick survives assasination attempt...convoy attacked...in Kabul(?)...no other details..searching Google now...

With the turquoise dome of the shrine to the 18th-century father of the Afghan nation rising in the background, Muhammad Akbar paused, leaned on his pick and said that he had never before been asked to dig a grave in the sacred soil of this compound. The grave was for Azimullah Muhammad, an 18-year-old who a week ago was an unknown seller of plastic water jugs from a dimly lit stall deep inside Kandahar's main bazaar. Now he is Afghanistan's newest hero, to be buried alongside mujahideen heroes of the guerilla war against the Soviet Union. On Friday, television viewers...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 7 - Two months before Afghanistan holds its first election for president, preparations have an air of democratic bustle. Nearly nine million eligible Afghans have registered to vote so far, several million more than expected, despite efforts by the Taliban to disrupt the process. NATO has agreed to provide extra forces to help the 18,000 American troops who are maintaining security. The incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, and 22 opponents have registered for the race and are starting to hold rounds of news conferences and rallies. Despite the trappings of democracy, the real decision about who will be...

Solving the Problem of Kurds is Too Complex for Most Iraqis Gulf News Amir Taheri June 23, 2004 With the end of the 14-months period of occupation, Iraq is likely to be faced, once again, with some of the problems it has had ever since it was put on the map as a nation-state in 1921. The most complex of these concerns the Kurds whose leaders are playing a game of bluff and counter bluff in the hope of exacting maximum advantage in a period of uncertainty. Both Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the two most prominent leaders of the...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Opposition leader and former defense chief Ahmed Shah Massood was injured and his close aide was killed Sunday in an explosion in northern Afghanistan, said Hajji Kahar, an opposition spokesman. Two men from Algeria posing as journalists apparently hid the explosive device in their camera, Kahar told The Associated Press in a satellite telephone interview from Khodja Bahauddin in northern Takhar province, where the explosion occurred. It's not clear whether the two men with the camera were killed. It's believed they were suicide bombers. "There was a lot of noise and smoke," said Kahar. Massood ...

By 1999, Massoud was seen by some at the Pentagon and inside the Clinton Cabinet as a spent force commanding bands of thugs. An inner circle of the Cabinet with access to the most closely guarded secrets was sharply divided over whether the United States should deepen its partnership with him. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton -- reflecting the views of professional analysts in their departments -- argued that Massoud's alliance was tainted and in decline. But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career...

<p>CNN's Mike Boettcher says Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud may have known about al Qaeda's plans for 9/11.</p> <p>Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.</p> <p>Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's main opposition, was killed September 9, 2001, by a bomb inside a video camera during an interview at his headquarters with two Tunisian al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists.</p>

The Perfect Storm author spent a month with anti-Taliban warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud in 2000. Now he offers his reaction to the recent murder of the Northern Alliance leader—and the subsequent attacks on the U.S. In November 2000 [National Geographic] Adventure sent contributing editor Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Reza (see photo gallery) to profile Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. The resulting article (read an excerpt) appeared in our March/April 2001 issue and has just been reprinted in Fire, a collection of Junger’s journalistic work. ________________________________________________________ On September 9, 2001, suicide bombers killed Massoud. Two days later the U.S. was...

<p>LONDON (AP) -- An Egyptian man accused of conspiring to assassinate an Afghan northern alliance leader was freed Thursday after a terrorist charge against him was dismissed -- but was immediately re-arrested on an extradition warrant from the United States.</p>

Last May, someone sat down at an IBM desktop here and typed out a polite letter to a bitter foe of al-Qaida, the anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The writer tapped at the computer for 97 minutes, according to its internal record, then printed out the fruit of his labor: a request for an interview with Massoud, to be conducted by “one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim Touzani.” ON SEPT. 9, two men posing as journalists, one carrying a passport in the name of Karim Touzani, detonated a hidden bomb as they interviewed Massoud. The legendary Afghan commander was ...

NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.Click here for full Washington Post article