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| India-Pakistan |
| Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's trail goes cold in Karachi |
| 2002-09-28 |
| When police dragged the blindfolded Al Qaeda suspect Ramzi Bin Al Shaiba out of a bullet-ridden apartment block in Karachi and past the waiting cameras the arrest was hailed as a crucial breakthrough in the fight against Osama Bin Laden’s network. But a report in The Guardian on Thursday said the newspaper had learnt the target of the raid, a much more senior Al Qaeda figure who agents had been tracking for several days, slipped away from the drab concrete building hours earlier. The newspaper said Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Kuwaiti who heads Al Qaeda’s military command, is still on the run in Karachi. Damn. I was hoping they'd get him... The capture of Al Shaiba, the alleged 20th hijacker, was little more than a lucky break in an otherwise unsuccessful operation, the report said. "We were not aware of Ramzi but we were told Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was there," the report quoted a Pakistani intelligence source as saying. "Over the past two weeks, Pakistani investigators say they have twice traced Mohammad to apartments in Karachi," The Guardian said. The two seemed to be hanging around together. I'd more suspect that the coppers were hoping to take them both, but were hoping more for Khalid than for Ramzi... At times they have come frustratingly close to their target: in the same raid that netted Al Shaiba police found a four-year-old girl who they believe is Mohammad’s adopted daughter. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |