Posted on 09/20/2001 5:11:26 AM PDT by angkor
Please read in particular Laurie Mylroie's article at the end. There is significant evidence that Ramzi Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim - the key individual in the WTC bombing of 1993 - was likely Iraqi agent.
FBI officials said yesterday that some of the 19 terrorists who carried out last week's assault on New York and Washington may have stolen the identities of other people, and their real names may remain unknown.
Saudi government officials also said yesterday that they have determined that at least two of the terrorists used the names of living, law-abiding Saudi citizens. Other hijackers may have faked their identities as well, they said..
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Friday that the bureau had "a fairly high level of confidence" that the hijacker names released by the FBI were not aliases. But one senior official said that "there may be some question with regard to the identity of at least some of them."
[Remainder snipped for copyright purposes, see link above]
Beirut -- man named by the US Department of Justice as a suicide hijackerAmerican Airlines flight 11 -- the first airliner to smash into the World Trade Centre -- is very much alive and living in Jeddah.
Abdulrahman al-Omari, a pilot with Saudi Airlines, was astonished to find himself accused of hijacking -- as well as being dead -- and has visited the US consulate in Jeddah to demand an explanation.
None has so far been forthcoming. It is possible that the hijacker adopted Mr al-Omari's identity but, if he had been using the same false name while training as a pilot in the US, he would presumably have been uncovered.
That is not the only error on the list of hijackers. The name of Ziad Jarrah -- identified as the pilot-hijacker of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania -- was misspelt "Jarrahi". He was a Lebanese whose family, living in the Bekaa Valley, spoke to him just two days before his death but who still refuse to believe that he was involved.
[snip]
But a Saudi Arabian Embassy official said Tuesday that those named in last week’s attacks may have stolen the identities of as many as four Saudi men.
Federal investigations received a report Monday that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University graduate Waleed al-Shehri is alive overseas and was not aboard American Airlines Flight 11 that rammed into the World Trade Center. Investigators are waiting for the man to present himself to consulate officials and confirm his identity.
The embassy official said high-ranking Saudi officials also are awaiting confirmation.
In Lebanon, the family of Ziad Jarrah contends there may be another man with the same name who was responsible for the hijacking. They say they do not think Jarrah, 26, was on board United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in western Pennsylvania.
The family contends that a lease showing Jarrah rented an apartment in New York City was dated before he left Lebanon, leading the family to think he was not involved in the attacks.
They also provided documentation showing Jarrah attended a different technical school than Atta and al-Shehhi, disputing German authorities who said Jarrah and the others attended the same school in Hamburg.
Jarrah lived in Germany until June 2000, when he went to the Miami area and took flight instruction at two schools in South Florida.
[snip]
On December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports. Consistent with his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost his passport and asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his non-original documentation enough to deny him a new passport. But it did provide him a six-month, temporary passport and told him to straighten things out when he returned "home." This turned out to be good enough for the purpose at hand.
By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what happened.
But why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most intriguing and vital aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a two-year degree in computer-aided electronic engineering, he returned to a job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As Abdul Basit and his family were permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained files on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and his parents in Kuwait's Interior Ministry have been tampered with. Key documents from the Kuwaiti files on Abdul Basit and his parents are missing. There should be copies of the front pages of the passports, including a picture, a notation of height, and so forth, but that material is gone. There is also information in the file that should not be there, especially a notation stating that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26, 1990, transiting to Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.
Who put that notation into Abdul Basit's file and why? Consider the circumstances of the moment. The Kuwaiti government had ceased to exist, and Iraq was an occupation authority; bent on establishing control over a hostile population amid near-universal condemnation, as an American-led coalition threatened war. The situation was chaotic as hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing for their lives. While the citizens of Western countries were pawns in a high stakes game, held hostage by Iraq, little attention was paid to the multitude of Third World nationals bent on escape. It truly boggles the imagination to believe that under such circumstances [the Iraqui occupation of Kuwait] an Iraqi bureaucrat was sitting calmly in Kuwait's Interior Ministry taking down the flight plans--including the itinerary and final destination--of otherwise non-descript Baluchis fleeing Kuwait. Rather, it looks as if Iraqi intelligence put that information into Abdul Basit's file to make it appear that he left Kuwait rather than died there, and that, like Ramzi Yousef, he too was Baluch.
Moreover, Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards, removing the original with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with one bearing those of Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators because no two people's match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so decisive makes them the perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus, after U.S. authorities learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they sent his fingerprints (taken by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at JFF airport when he was briefly detained for illegal entry) to Kuwait, asking if they matched those of Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said that they did, everyone assumed the question settled--forgetting that Kuwait's files were not secure during the Iraqi occupation.
Pakistan also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently resident abroad, at the embassy in the country in which they live. On August 9, Baghdad ordered all embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close. Most did, including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his family that should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The Pakistani government now has no record of the family.
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