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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (55789)	7/23/2004 1:30:56 PM
From: Neeka	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

Here is more information about Tawfiq bin Attash. I've found this data base to have excellent information about various leading characters and presumed enemies. Fortunately, this one is still in custody. M Pakistan nabs al-Qaida planner : By James Risen, The New York Times News Service May 1, 2003 WASHINGTON - A top al-Qaida operative suspected of playing crucial roles in both the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000 and the Sept. 11 terror attacks was captured in Pakistan this week along with five other terror suspects, U.S. officials said Wednesday. Waleed Mohammed Bin Attash, best known as Tawfiq bin Attash or Tawfiq Attash Khallad, is a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent who was captured in Karachi. He is the highest ranking al-Qaida leader to be taken into custody since Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the terrorist network's chief of operations, was captured March 2, according to U.S. officials. Bin Attash has been identified by U.S. intelligence officials as an important lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, one who was deeply involved in many of al-Qaida's deadliest terrorist acts. He is believed to have been the mastermind behind the Cole attack, in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed, and was also a leading participant in a critical meeting of al-Qaida operatives in Malaysia in January 2000 that may have been called to plan attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Two of the 19 hijackers involved in those attacks also attended the Malaysia meeting. Once, as U.S. officials expect, he is turned over to the United States for questioning, bin Attash will be the only person in U.S. custody who attended that planning session, and he may be able to provide the CIA and FBI with fresh insight into the inner workings of the Sept. 11 plot. President Bush praised the capture Wednesday, telling reporters that "it was a major, significant find" in the war on terrorism. The five other suspects captured Wednesday have so far said that they are Pakistanis. Bin Attash's capture comes just days after 10 other suspects in the 2000 Cole bombing reportedly escaped from jail in Yemen. Their mass escape had raised questions about whether they had received help from inside the Yemeni government. U.S. officials said Wednesday they know of no connection between the jailbreak in Yemen and the capture of Bin Attash in Pakistan. Bin Attash is believed to have risen rapidly through the ranks of al-Qaida throughout the late 1990s. After serving as one of bin Laden's bodyguards, he gained the terrorist leader's trust, U.S. intelligence officials believe. He lost a foot in combat in Afghanistan, although it is unclear when this happened. He first came to the attention of the United States in late 1999, when U.S. intelligence overheard a telephone conversation out of Yemen and learned that a man named "Khallad" would be attending a meeting of suspected terrorists in Malaysia the following January. The CIA then decided to conduct surveillance of the meeting to see who else showed up. The agency was able to identify two others at the meeting, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who later entered the United States. The two men were part of the hijacking team that crashed a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA came under fire for failing to promptly notify the FBI that the two suspected terrorists were trying to enter the United States. The CIA waited until August 2001 to ask that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi be placed on government watch lists to prevent their entry into the country, but by that time they were already in the United States, and the FBI was unable to track them down. The delay in placing the two on the watch list was one of several missed signals that were the focus of last year's congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, and helped prompt the Bush administration to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts. trackingthethreat.com