http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/23/AR2005072301052.html
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Al Qaeda Leaders Seen in Control
Experts Say Radicals In London, Egypt May Have Followed Orders
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 24, 2005; A01
LONDON, July 23 -- The back-to-back nature of the deadly attacks in
Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used,
suggests that the al Qaeda leadership may have given the orders for
both operations and is a clear sign that Osama bin Laden and his
deputies remain in control of the network, according to interviews
with counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and
the Middle East.
Investigators on Saturday said that they believed the details of the
bombing plots in Egypt and Britain -- the deadliest terrorist strikes
in each country's history -- were organized locally by groups working
independently of each other. In Sharm el-Sheikh, where the death toll
rose to 88 people, attention centered on an al Qaeda affiliate blamed
for a similar attack last October at Taba, another Red Sea resort. In
London, where 52 bystanders were killed in the subway and on a bus,
police have identified three of the four presumed suicide bombers as
British natives with suspected connections to Pakistani radicals.
But intelligence officials and terrorist experts said they suspect
that bin Laden or his lieutenants may have sponsored both operations
from afar, as well as other explosions that have killed hundreds of
people in Spain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Morocco since 2002. The
hallmarks in each case: multiple bombings aimed at unguarded, civilian
targets that are designed to scare Westerners and rattle the economy.
The officials and analysts also said the recent attacks indicate that
the nerve center of the original al Qaeda network remains alive and
well, despite the fact that many leaders have been killed or captured
since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States. Bin Laden
may be in hiding, the officials and analysts said, and much is still
unknown about the network. But they added that his organization
remains fully capable of orchestrating attacks worldwide by recruiting
local groups to do its bidding.
"What the London and Sharm el-Sheikh attacks may have in common are
the people giving directions: This is what needs to be done, and this
is how you do it," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for
the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St.
Andrews in Scotland.
Prince Turki al Faisal, the former director of foreign intelligence
for Saudi Arabia who was named this past week as the kingdom's new
ambassador to the United States, said in an interview, "All of these
groups maintain a link of sort with bin Laden, either through Internet
Web sites, or through messengers, or by going to the border area
between Pakistan and Afghanistan and maybe not necessarily meeting
with bin Laden himself, but with his people.
"Since September 11, these people have continued to operate," he said,
speaking at his residence here, where he has been serving as
ambassador to Britain. "They are on the run, but they still act with
impunity. They can produce their material and get it to the media, it
seems, anytime they like. Along with that, of course, are the orders
they give to their operatives, wherever they may be."
Overthrowing the Saudi monarchy has been a longtime goal for bin
Laden, a wealthy Saudi native who was once close to the kingdom's
rulers but was stripped of his citizenship in 1994.
Some senior U.S. officials have argued that bin Laden has been
effectively bottled up since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in
2001 and question whether al Qaeda still has the ability to plan major
operations such as the Sept. 11 attacks.
In April, for example, the State Department concluded in its annual
report on terrorist activity around the world that al Qaeda had been
supplanted as the most worrisome threat by unaffiliated local groups
of Islamic radicals acting on their own, without help from bin Laden
or his aides. The pattern of attacks in 2004, the report stated,
illustrates "what many analysts believe is a new phase of the global
war on terrorism, one in which local groups inspired by al Qaeda
organize and carry out attacks with little or no support or direction
from al Qaeda itself."
Some regional Islamic radical groups function independently of al
Qaeda but enter into mutual alliances for specific operations or
campaigns, experts say. In Iraq, for instance, one of the primary
networks of insurgents fighting the U.S. military is led by Abu Musab
Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has pledged his loyalty to bin Laden and acts
publicly on behalf of al Qaeda but has developed his own organization.
But intelligence officials and analysts from European and Arab
countries say there is increasing evidence that several of the
deadliest bombings against civilian targets in recent years can be
traced back to suspected mid-level al Qaeda operatives acting on
behalf of bin Laden and the network's leadership. In some cases,
counterterrorism investigators have concluded that bin Laden or his
emissaries set plans in motion to launch attacks and then left it up
to local networks or cells to take care of the details.
"The rather well-formed structure that they had prior to 9/11 does
seem to be degraded," said a senior British counterterrorism official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But there is still a fairly
potent, if diffuse network out there that still aspires to make
decisions. We should be very wary about writing them off."
Saudi officials said the interrogation of terrorism suspects in that
country, as well as intercepted electronic communications, show that
bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, dispatched cell organizers
to Saudi Arabia in 2002 and weighed in on basic strategic decisions
made by the local al Qaeda affiliate. The al Qaeda leadership also
gave direct orders to attack specific targets in the kingdom, Saudi
officials said.
The local al Qaeda network carried out its first attack on May 12,
2003, driving explosive-laden cars into the gates of Western
residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including nine
Americans. The explosion stunned Saudi government leaders, who only a
few months before had said publicly that there were no terrorist
groups operating inside the kingdom.
Less than one week after the Riyadh bombing, explosions hit Morocco,
which has a long history of close relations with the United States and
little history of terrorism. On May 16, 2003, suicide bombers launched
multiple attacks on hotels, restaurants and other civilian targets in
Casablanca, killing 45 people.
At first, counterterrorism officials in Saudi Arabia and Morocco saw
no connection between the two attacks other than the fact that they
occurred four days apart. They assumed that the timing was
coincidental, or that the Moroccan bombings were prompted in part by
the publicity generated by what happened in Riyadh.
Today, however, counterterrorism officials in both countries say there
were connections between the two groups that carried out the attacks.
Two Moroccan al Qaeda operatives suspected of helping to organize the
Casablanca bombings, Karim Mejjati and Hussein Mohammed Haski,
surfaced as leaders of the local al Qaeda network in Saudi Arabia and
were named to the kingdom's list of most wanted terrorist suspects.
Mejjati was killed in a shootout with anti-terrorism police in a small
Saudi town in April. Haski was arrested in July 2004 in Belgium, where
he faces charges of helping to organize another sleeper cell with al
Qaeda connections, according to Belgian officials and court documents.
Both Haski and Mejjati were veterans of al Qaeda training camps in
Afghanistan, documents show.
A similar connection has emerged between the Casablanca bombings and
the March 11, 2004, train explosions that killed 191 people in Madrid.
Spanish investigators have identified a suspected ringleader of the
Madrid attacks as a Moroccan al Qaeda operative named Amer Azizi, who
is also wanted by authorities in Morocco on charges of involvement in
the network that organized the Casablanca attacks.
Like Mejjati and Haski, Azizi spent time at al Qaeda training camps in
Afghanistan before 2001 and is believed to be a conduit to the al
Qaeda leadership, intelligence officials said.
Counterterrorism investigators and analysts said it was highly
unlikely that the people who organized the July 7 London bombings were
directly involved in the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks. But they predicted
that both plots would eventually be traced directly to al Qaeda.
Ranstorp, the terrorism expert in Scotland, predicted that Egyptian
investigators would pursue possible links to Zawahiri, an
Egyptian-born physician who has served as bin Laden's top deputy and
al Qaeda's leading ideologue since the early 1990s. "I doubt very much
that this was done by the same group of Pakistanis who were apparently
responsible for what happened in London," Ranstorp said. "But this
very well could have been directed by Zawahiri, in terms of activating
the Egyptian front."
U.S. and European intelligence officials said they believe bin Laden
and Zawahiri remain in hiding along the rugged border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, where access and communications with the
outside world remain difficult. But many other al Qaeda leaders have
found refuge in Pakistan's urban areas, where they are freer to move
around and make contact with operatives visiting from other countries.
Pakistani officials have confirmed that three of the four suicide
bombers involved in the London attacks this month visited Pakistan for
extended periods over the past two years, spending time in Karachi and
Lahore, Pakistan's largest cities. Investigators suspect they may have
met with al Qaeda operatives who gave them instructions for carrying
out the bombings.
British officials and counterterrorism analysts said the trail of the
investigation was clearly leading to Pakistan, which has faced renewed
criticism for giving haven to al Qaeda sympathizers and other Islamic
radical groups. Several highly wanted al Qaeda leaders who have been
captured in recent years by the FBI and CIA were caught not in the
remote terrain along the Pakistani border, but in major cities such as
Karachi, Rawalpindi and Lahore.
"Why is it that all the roads keep going back to Pakistan?" said M. J.
Gohel, a terrorism analyst and chief executive of the Asia-Pacific
Foundation, a London-based think tank. "Is it a coincidence, or is
there something more? The linkages there are just too strong and
consistent. The whole backbone of the jihadi infrastructure is not
being dismantled. It is still functioning."
The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, pledged this week to
renew his crackdown on "extremists" and Islamic radicals in the
country and said officials were doing everything they could to
cooperate with the investigation into the London bombings. But he
bristled at the idea that Pakistan has remained a haven for al Qaeda.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company