Title: All roads of
terror lead to Osama's den
Author: Kathy Gannon
Publication: The Times
of India
Date: March 6, 2000
The passenger, indistinguishable
from his fellows in beard, turban and baggy pants, was whisked through
security at Jalalabad airport on the strength of a flimsy rectangle of
cardboard.
The pass identified the
holder simply as "Mr Mauritania" and made clear he was not to be questioned
or detained. "It was a very important card. It was like cardboard and had
a Taliban stamp on it." recalled the airport manager, Mr Abdullah.
It was good that Mr Mauritania
had the pass. He was carrying eight pistols, six satellite phones and three
suitcases stuffed with riyals, the Saudi currency, said Mr Abdullah who,
like many Afghans, uses just one name. Mr Mauritania is believed by international
authorities to be a key lieutenant of Osama bin Laden.
But at the shabby, single-runway
airport here, Mr Mauritania is simply the most prominent among the many
hundreds wearing paths to the Afghan camps where Bin Laden's Al Qaida group
trains terrorists. Investigators believe that Al Qaida-trained terrorists
were behind two recently foiled bomb plots - in the U.S. ant Jordan - as
well as the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224
people and the 1996 bomb that killed 19 American airmen in Saudi Arabia.
Authorities emphasise
that they did not have evidence to link Bin Laden directly to the plots.
Yet an investigation that encircles the globe kept pointing to Afghanistan
and the wealthy Saudi renegade. On Tuesday, Jordanian officials told reporters
that the two thwarted bomb plots were connected and that interrogation
of 14 suspects in Jordan helped the U.S. authorities apprehend the alleged
conspirators in Washington state, New York and Canada.'
Ahmed Ressam, 32, was
stopped on December 14 while trying to enter Port Angeles in Washington
by ferry from British Columbia, in a car packed with bomb-making materials.
Mr Ressam and three other young Algerians are now in American and Canadian
jails for allegedly plotting to blow up unidentified US. targets around
New Year's Day.
The suspects have many
compatriots among the new arrivals flocking to Afghan training camps. In
three months, Mr Abdullah said, 15 Algerians have flown into Jalalabad,
capital of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, where Afghan sources
say Al Qaida - Arabic for "the base" - runs at least three camps.
The Algerians came in
groups of two and three, Mr Abdullah said, and all carried satchels of
U.S. dollars. They, too, flashed Taliban identity passes - "but just pieces
of paper ... not special like Mr Mauritania," the airport manager said.
At the camps, Bin Laden's trainees learn to use explosives, heavy weapons,
light arms and chemical weapons, a Taliban commander said.
"Everywhere there is
training," he said, scrubbing his teeth with a frayed piece of wood as
he spoke. "'The Arabs are coming and going. There is a big house in Jalalabad
where they get their documents. I saw it myself."
A young Afghan who trained
this winter at a camp in the mountainous Kunar province in north-eastern
Afghanistan, said he saw men from Chechnya, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Cuba
and North Korea. The North Koreans, he said, had brought chemical weapons
which were stored in caves and in the dozens of sunbaked mud-and stone
houses.
"Myself I saw 10 satellite
dishes," said the Afghan, who also did not want his name used. "There were
doctors, engineers, chemical engineers... Everyone was speaking different
languages," among them French, English, Persian, Arabic and Pashto, the
main language of the Taliban.
The apparent links between
the Afghanistan camps and the alleged bomb plots are many. For three weeks
before his arrest, Mr Ressam shared a motel room in Vancouver. British
Columbia, with Abdelmajid Dahoumane, another 32-year-old Algerian who is
now a fugitive. Mr Ressam and Mr Dahoumane trained at Bin Laden camps before
travelling to Canada, said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism
chief working as a security consultant in McLean, Virginia.
Mr Dahoumane "is very
close to Osama," said Mr Janullah, an Afghan journalist with Wahadat, a
newspaper in north-western Pakistan. Others entangled in the alleged Ressam
plot include: Abdel Ghani Meskini, 31 - an Algerian whose New York phone
number was found in Mr Ressam's pocket who was arrested December 30.
(AP)
