Arrested al-Qaida Operative Sheds Light

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This is CNN, again.

LONDON (AP) - A newly arrested al-Qaida operative is providing valuable insight into the inner workings of Osama bin Laden's network as the United States remains on alert for attacks, U.S. officials and a diplomat in Africa told The Associated Press.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in the deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, has much to say. His life has tracked al-Qaida's evolution from a tightly organized network assaulting prominent U.S. targets to a looser group struggling to maintain momentum.

Ghailani, once on the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list with a $5 million bounty for the 1998 embassy bombings, was apprehended last month in Pakistan during a sweep that netted more than 20 al-Qaida suspects in that country and led to more than a dozen arrests in Britain.

Attention surrounding the arrests has focused on another suspect, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, an alleged al-Qaida computer expert. But Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said, ``The most important arrest that has been made of late has been that of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.''


While U.S. officials agree Ghailani is an important catch, they are still trying to figure out what role the 5-foot-3 Tanzanian played in al-Qaida at the time of his arrest. Some say he was an emerging leader, others aren't so sure.


Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden has always found a use for Ghailani, from laundering money in West African diamond markets ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks, to planning the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, to linking up in eastern Pakistan with up and coming al-Qaida plotters.


The arrests of Ghailani and Khan are believed to have helped disrupt plans to launch attacks in coming months - computers from the two contained photographs of potential financial targets in the United States - in New York, New Jersey and Washington - and London's Heathrow Airport, as well as pictures of underpasses beneath several buildings in London.


The photos were part of surveillance by suspected al-Qaida plotters between 2000 and 2001, but the Bush administration considered them another sign al-Qaida might be planning attacks.


Ghailani is cooperating with interrogators and one U.S. official said Ghailani is providing ``valuable'' insight into how al-Qaida operates. But the official wouldn't elaborate.


A diplomat in Africa, who is familiar with Ghailani's case, said there are indications Ghailani recently made contact with militants on the continent. The diplomat could not provide details, but Ghailani was captured July 25 with two South Africans who Pakistani officials said were plotting attacks on tourist sites in their home country.


Both the U.S. official and the diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity.


South African officials have dismissed the reported threats, but Feroz Ibrahim, believed to be in his 30s, and Zubair Ismail, in his 20s, were found with several maps of South African cities. And Ghailani's major al-Qaida roles have come in the network's Africa operations.


Known among his al-Qaida peers as Ahmed the Tanzanian, Ghailani was in 1997 introduced to recruits as ``a friend of al-Qaida,'' convicted bomber Mohammed Sadiq Odeh told the FBI, according to an official transcript of his interrogation.


Born in 1974, Ghailani grew up in Zanzibar, an archipelago off the coast of Tanzania that was once the seat of the Sultanate of Oman. Now part of Tanzania, Zanzibar remains 95 percent Muslim and retains an Arab flavor, its harbors filled with wooden dhows and skies pierced by the minarets of mosques.


Ghailani attended the mosques growing up, and in his twenties is believed to have dedicated himself to Islam and became a tabligh, or missionary.


In the months before the embassy bombings, Ghailani pedaled around Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on his bike, searching for the oxygen and acetylene tanks used to build the truck bomb that destroyed the city's U.S. Embassy. That attack killed 12 people, all Africans, and earned Ghailani an indictment in a U.S. federal court.


A near simultaneous bombing of the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, devastated a city block, killing 219 people, including 12 Americans.


Ghailani, and al-Qaida's other East Africa ringleaders, left for Pakistan a day before the attacks.


From there, he drifted to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan - bin Laden's home base until the U.S. military campaign in late 2001 made him a fugitive - spending time ``with other al-Qaida notables,'' said another U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity from Washington.


By March 1999, Ghailani landed in West Africa's diamond black market: Liberia, a rogue nation being pilfered by warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor.


Taylor, now a fugitive from a war crimes indictment, gave al-Qaida entree to the region's diamond mines, U.N. war crimes prosecutors said in a confidential dossier obtained by the AP.


Buying up gems direct from the diggers, Ghailani helped al-Qaida make perhaps $15 million off the diamond business, one U.S. official told the AP. Al-Qaida was thought to be snapping up diamonds in order to have easily convertible, untraceable resources after the first U.S.-led moves freezing al-Qaida bank accounts and other assets worldwide in 1999.


Ghailani was quoted as telling people in Liberia's war-battered capital he had done some diamond mining work before, in Congo. But the Tanzanian was valuable to al-Qaida's Africa dealings for another reason: the color of his skin.


Al-Qaida ordered Ghailani and another East African to handle the diamond buying ``because they were of African descent and would not arouse any suspicions,'' the U.N. dossier said.


Ghailani, believed to be about 30, reportedly stayed in West Africa, buying up gems in Sierra Leone, at least as late as January 2000.


After 2002, Ghailani largely dropped off the radar. The U.S. official in Washington said he was known to have traveled to Pakistan in 2003, and apparently began putting down roots. He married an Uzbek woman and fathered a handful of children.


It's not clear if Ghailani was playing an active role in al-Qaida in the last two years or if he was recently called back into action, said the first U.S. official.


``That's something we've seen a lot of - some of these guys are everywhere, doing everything for a few years and then drop away for a few years only to pop back up again,'' the official said.


The same skin color that helped him blend in Africa later worked against him: He apparently came under suspicion in part because he was the only black man in the eastern Pakistani city of Gujrat, where authorities captured him after a July 25 gunbattle.


Associated Press writers Ellen Knickmeyer and Edward Harris in Dakar and Ted Bridis in Washington contributed to this report.

[Keevan_Colton]

I thought for a moment that this was going to be about a new interrogation technique involving dipping suspects in phosphorus.