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| Caucasus | |
| 9/11 hijackers originally planned to fight in Chechnya | |
| 2004-08-11 | |
| The ring-leaders of the September 11 attacks in the United States had originally planned to travel to Chechnya to fight Russian federal troops in the breakaway region, before being waylaid into an al Qaeda plot to attack the United States instead, the September 11 commission disclosed in a report cited by The Washington Post. The 9/11 commission's report on the investigations were published recently and cited previously secret interrogations of cell member Ramzi Binalshibh, revealing that the Hamburg radicals who carried out the attacks had been urged by a passenger on a German train to put off their mission to Chechnya. The mysterious passenger — identified as Khalid Masri — introduced them to Mauritanian businessman Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who later arranged a personal introduction to Osama bin Laden. The Islamic radicals in the Hamburg cell that included chief hijacker Muhammad Atta had been planning to go to Chechnya and fight along with the Islamic separatist rebels there. Slahi told the men that it was difficult to slip across the border into Chechnya. He encouraged them instead to go to Afghanistan. He assisted with their travel plans and arranged for them to meet operatives for al Qaeda in Pakistan, who in turn arranged a private meeting between Binalshibh and bin Laden in December 1999. The Chechnya plot, meanwhile, was never realized.
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| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 OBL had to get his people from somewhere. The greater significance is not from where he got his people as much as that the people were not, by any stretch of the imagination, directly oppressed by anyone, but were rather well-off: With more training, the pilots would have gotten good civilian jobs. Shoots to heck the argument that the Islamic fundo side is motivated by "economics". |
| Posted by: Ptah 2004-08-11 07:56 |