| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa: Subsaharan |
| The journey of Ghailani as an al-Qaeda leader |
| 2004-08-03 |
| His baby-face pictures belie his reputation. And who would guess he is worth $25-million (around R155-million)? That's the price the FBI put on the head of Tanzanian terror suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. And that's the fortune a bounty-hunter may have claimed when he tipped off Pakistani police and led them to Ghailani's hideout. With him in a house in Gujrat, 175km east of Islamabad, were two South Africans, 20-year-old Islamic-studies student Zubair Ismail of Laudium, Pretoria, and Dr Feroz Ganchi, reportedly from Fordsburg. All three were captured after a dramatic eight-hour shoot-out. Ghailani's Uzbek wife was arrested with him. Ghailani began life on the paradise island of Zanzibar but, security officials say, wound up in the hardcore cells of al-Qaeda. His youthful pictures staring out from the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List carried with it the multimillion reward for his capture - the same amount being offered for Osama bin Laden. He made the Top 20 list for his alleged role in the devastating 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people and injured about 5 000. Ghailani is believed to have bought the truck used to blow up the Dar-es-Salaam embassy, as well as oxygen and acetylene tanks used to intensify the blast. Eleven people were killed in the Dar-es-Salaam attack, and some 213 in the Nairobi blast. But his name surfaced much more recently on the radar screens of al-Qaeda hunters and anti-terrorism authorities. The FBI was so sure that Ghailani and six of his accomplices were actively plotting fresh terror attacks that it issued a fresh warning in May, accompanied by a photo list of him and six others. He uses a range of birthdates that could age him as either 30 or 34, according to the FBI, and operates under at least 20 aliases including "Foopie", "Fupi," and "Ahmed the Tanzanian." He speaks Swahili and English. In December 1998, he was indicted in New York for his alleged role in the twin African bombings. Little is publicly known of his whereabouts since then. Some reports had him fleeing to Afghanistan, while others pinned him in Monrovia, Liberia, at least in early 2001. Britain's Observer newspaper in 2002 reported that he had hidden out in Liberia in 2001, financing al-Qaeda operations through the illegal diamond trade. Ghailani and his cohorts had quietly moved to Gujrat around four weeks before his arrest, Pakistani authorities said. They discovered his hideout after arresting a local man who used to bring them groceries, and told police of the presence of "foreign terrorists." The gang fought off police and commandoes for eight hours through Saturday night into Sunday, only surrendering when they ran out of ammunition. Like three top al-Qaeda figures caught before him in Pakistan, Ghailani was found not in the remote hinterland along the Afghan border where Bin Laden is believed to be hiding, but in a big city. Gujrat is dotted with factories making electronics and cutlery. Ghailani's arrest was hailed as a major coup for al-Qaeda hunters. Pakistan's Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat described the capture as "a phenomenal success in the international fight against terrorism." But some experts cautioned that while Ghailani may be significant, he was probably not part of the network's higher echelons and thus unlikely to make a dent in al-Qaeda's terror activities. CNN's terrorism expert Peter Bergen said Ghailani was more likely part of al-Qaeda's "group B." The East African attacks had the stamp of Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, but it was a previously unknown group, the "Islamic Army for the Liberation of Muslim Holy Sites," which initially claimed responsibility. On the morning of August 7 1998, two car bombs went off almost simultaneously outside the embassies of the United States in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in neighbouring Tanzania. The attacks, the bloodiest of their kind in sub-Saharan Africa either before or since, killed 224 people - 213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania - and injured around 5 000, almost all of them Africans. In Nairobi the blast reduced a neighbouring four-storey building to a mountain of rubble. According to US experts, the two east African embassies had been easy targets because they were among the least secure of the 260 US embassies and consulates around the world. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |