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| Southeast Asia |
| Yazid Sufaat may be released |
| 2003-12-08 |
| After Yazid Sufaat was arrested crossing the Thai border into his native Malaysia nearly two years ago, U.S. officials wanted to learn all they could from him. They knew the 38-year-old former Malaysian army captain had allowed two of the Sept. 11 hijackers to stay at his condominium near Kuala Lumpur for a crucial al-Qaida meeting in January 2000. They knew he had offered similar hospitality to alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Now, just days before Sufaat could be eligible for release under his nation’s laws, senior U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials say new evidence leads them to believe Sufaat may have been more than just an associate of key al-Qaida figures in Southeast Asia: They say Sufaat may have played an important role in al-Qaida’s attempts to develop biological and chemical weapons. And they think he can answer crucial questions about how close al-Qaida was to attaining those weapons before U.S.-led forces destroyed the group’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. Those questions grow more pressing each day, as senior U.S. counterterrorism officials now see a biological or chemical attack by al-Qaida inside the U.S. as possibly the nation’s biggest domestic terrorism threat. But U.S. access to Sufaat has been sharply limited, officials say, at least in part because of strained relations between Malaysia and the U.S. and growing tensions in the region over the war on terrorism. At the same time, U.S. officials are jittery because Sufaat will be eligible for release in a couple of days. Snip. Sufaat, who graduated from a California university with a degree in biological sciences, has been jailed by the Malaysians since attempting to return from Afghanistan via the Thai border on Dec. 9, 2001. The Malaysians had been looking for him since almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. They knew Sufaat had played host to Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, when they attended an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia 20 months before the 2001 suicide hijackings. Malaysian security services had filmed and tracked the meeting’s attendees at the CIA’s request. The Malaysians also learned, based on information unearthed by the FBI, that Moussaoui, the only person charged in the U.S. as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks, had stayed at Sufaat’s apartment in October 2000 before he came to the U.S. for flight training. When Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges about four weeks before Sept. 11, the FBI found a letter signed by Sufaat among Moussaoui’s possessions, records show. It stated that Moussaoui was the U.S. marketing consultant for a Malaysian company, InFocus Tech, which was partially owned by Sufaat’s wife. Sufaat was jailed under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, a controversial law that has been used, much to the dismay of the U.S. and other nations, to lock up political prisoners. The law allows the Malaysian authorities to hold people without charges for up to two years if they are deemed to be potential national security threats - meaning Sufaat’s term would expire Tuesday, unless it is renewed. Sufaat has been held with other alleged militants at the Kamunting Detention Center, about 150 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. Snip. The Malaysians said Sufaat had served for about six months in a "Taliban medical brigade" in Afghanistan before returning to Malaysia, although they would later say he provided his Malaysian interrogators with some valuable information on terror operations in the region. It was nearly a year before the FBI got access to Sufaat at Kamunting. Agents were allowed to conduct a brief interview with him in November 2002, and Malaysian interrogators later provided the U.S. with some follow-up information. As limited as it was, the U.S. questioning of Sufaat drew sharp criticism from Malaysia’s main Islamic parties. After that, Sufaat was largely forgotten - until this fall. On Aug. 12, after the bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, a joint U.S.-Thai operation led to the capture of Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was the alleged operational leader in Southeast Asia for an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist network. U.S. intelligence officials placed Hambali at the center of the planning for the Jakarta blast, as well as a deadly October 2002 attack at a nightclub on Bali, which killed more than 200 people. After his capture, Hambali was taken into U.S. custody and whisked to an undisclosed location for interrogations. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said he began cooperating almost immediately, allowing them to thwart planned attacks in the region and break up terrorist cells. Within a few weeks, Hambali also allegedly began talking about al-Qaida’s efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons, according to senior U.S. officials. Those revelations resonated with senior U.S. counterterrorism officials. At the time they were developing separate intelligence suggesting that al-Qaida had put off plans to conduct small-scale operations in the U.S., fearing they would prompt a security crackdown that would make it impossible to execute a bigger, mass-casualty attack on par with Sept. 11, according to senior U.S. officials. The biggest fear, then and now, these officials say, is that such a plan has remained undetected and would involve chemical or biological weapons. Snip. A U.S. intelligence official also said, "There is always room for us to learn more, and we believe that he can provide those answers" about al-Qaida’s alleged chemical and biological weapons program. This intelligence official also said the notion that Sufaat played a role in al-Qaida’s development of chemical and biological weapons "is right on." Malaysians, Indonesians and others in the region have been seeking access to Hambali, the senior U.S. official said, in exchange for more access to the information on militants they’re holding, and neither side has been satisfied with the access they’re getting. The U.S. has been reluctant to provide even its closest allies with access to top al-Qaida captives. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |