Police in Pakistan yesterday seized Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 attacks on the United States. Considered the most dangerous Islamic terrorist actively operating in the world, his arrest represents a stunning blow against the al-Qaida organisation.
Twenty heavily-armed police officers and US intelligence agents arrested the 38-year-old in a dawn raid on a house in Rawalpindi, close to the capital Islamabad, according to senior government sources in Islamabad.
They broke into the modest brick house in the West Ridge area of the city at around 2.30 am yesterday. Mohammad was one of three men arrested in the raid.
‘We have finally apprehended Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,’ said military representative Major-General Rashid Qureshi. ‘It is a big achievement. He is the kingpin of al-Qaida.’ He said the arrest was the work of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
Mohammad, who headed Osama bin Laden’s military command, was detained with one other Arab man and a Pakistani, the owner of the house. Last night the men were still being interrogated in Pakistan, said Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, a senior counter-terrorism officer. The second Arab man arrested is also believed to be an al-Qaida figure.
Mohammad (37) carries a $25m price on his head. He was known to have been hiding in Karachi, a sprawling city on Pakistan’s southern coast, for several months. New intelligence in the last few days pinpointed Mohammad in Rawalpindi. He is likely to be handed over to US officials and flown out of Pakistan within days, probably to the heavily-guarded US military camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Mohammad has Kuwaiti and Pakistani citizenship and relied on his fluent Urdu to travel freely through Pakistan. He is believed to have played a crucial part orchestrating the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.
The third man, the Pakistani suspect Ahmed Abdul Qadoos, was the owner of the house and was sheltering Mohammad. Qadoos has links with Jamaat-e Islami, a leading Islamist party which is now a significant opposition force in Islamabad’s parliament. Islamist leaders have criticised the involvement of the FBI in raids on al-Qaida suspects in Pakistan.
Yesterday’s raid marked the first significant arrests of al-Qaida suspects in Pakistan for several months. Hundreds fled from the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan over the border and into Pakistan. Although many were arrested, several managed to slip away.
A year ago Pakistani intelligence officials, working with the FBI, made their first serious advance when they captured Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaida lieutenant, in the town of Faisalabad in central Pakistan.
In the next breakthrough in September police arrested Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, another high-ranking al-Qaida figure, in Karachi. The target in that raid had been Mohammad himself, but he had escaped the scene hours before the raid. Bin al-Shibh, investigators later discovered, was his aide.
US intelligence agencies have been pursuing Mohammad for many years. He is believed to have helped his nephew Ramzi Yousef in the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993.
Two years later he was suspected of taking part in a plot with Yousef in Manila in January 1995 to bomb several US airliners over the Pacific. Mohammad was later indicted for his part in the plot. He is also suspected of playing a role in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people. He is thought to be the man who first suggested flying passenger aircraft into the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon. – Guardian Unlimited Â