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| Southeast Asia |
| How the US stopped Hambali |
| 2006-02-11 |
| IT should have been no surprise that the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiah and its operations chief Hambali were named by US President George W. Bush as the figures behind a 2002 plot to fly a plane into California's tallest building. JI and Hambali, mastermind of the Bali bombing, were not only intimately connected with al-Qa'ida's chief strategist Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the plan to destroy the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, they had been in cahoots for years, planning to blow up US airliners and fly them into skyscrapers. As far back as 1995, Mohammed and Hambali put together a terror blueprint that has become known as Operation Bojinka. It was a three-pronged plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a visit to Manila, blow up 11 US planes and fly a Cessna packed with explosives into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But for the second wave of attacks on the US, planned for 2002, they had decided to avoid operatives with Arab backgrounds. Instead, Hambali recruited a Malaysian militant named Zaini Zakaria to head the cell responsible for flying a plane into the LA skyscraper, then known as the Library Tower. Mr Bush released details of the planned attack on Thursday, naming JI and Hambali and saying it illustrated the need to move swiftly against any suspicious terrorist activity. "It took the combined efforts of several countries to break up this plot," the President said. "By working together, we stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland." While it might have come as a revelation to the Americans that a Southeast Asian terror group might be targeting US interests, it was no surprise to Australian and Asian intelligence agencies who have been hunting JI for years. JI operates mainly in Indonesia and The Philippines and is blamed for a string of attacks including the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people, among them 88 Australians. The terror group has also been accused of staging the October 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the Marriott Hotel bombing and three suicide bombings in Bali last October that killed four Australians. Its former director of operations Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, was considered the link man between JI and al-Qa'ida and he had been crucial to plans by JI to set up terror cells. Intelligence documents have revealed that JI had divided its operations into four major cells, known as mantiqis, and Mantiqi 4 covered the Indonesian province of Papua and Australia. In preparation for his plans, Hambali had sent terrorist trainer Azman Hashim to Australia to run a paramilitary weapons training camp for Australians in the Blue Mountains. Hambali also organised for twins Abdul Rahim Ayub and Abdul Rahman Ayub to further the JI cause in Australia. They lived in Sydney and Perth. Both brothers have since left the country. One of them is now on the Phillipine island of Mindanao training terrorist recruits. The US Government's 2004 9/11 commission report detailed the close links that developed between Hambali and Mohammed in the late 1990s. "Hambali did not originally orient JI's operations toward attacking the United States, but his involvement with al-Qa'ida appears to have inspired him to pursue American targets. "Hambali's newfound interest in striking against the US manifested itself in a spate of terrorist plans. Fortunately none came to fruition," the report concluded in an oblique reference to what could have been the LA plot. The commission said Mohammed, when interrogated by US agents, had taken credit for Hambali's shift of focus, claiming to have urged the JI operations chief to concentrate on attacks on the US economy. The al-Qa'ida-JI partnership led to a number of proposals that would marry al-Qa'ida's financial and technical strength with JI's access to materials and local operatives, with Hambali in the critical role of co-ordinator. According to terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, Hambali played a key role in Operation Bojinka. He said the plot was to involve a sequence of events from the assassination of Pope John Paul II in The Philippines on January 15 to the bombing of 11 airliners on January 21 and 22 followed by the flying of a Cessna packed with explosives into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But the plot came undone after a fire in a Manila apartment on January 6, 1995. Police discovered evidence of the plot on a computer in the apartment and the operation was abandoned. But plans to blow up planes and fly them into buildings continued. And in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Hambali and Mohammed began hatching the Library Tower plan. It has been revealed that they established a cell and four terrorists were being trained to carry out the attack, which included using shoe bombs to break into to an aeroplane cockpit. The JI operatives trained in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden. The head of the cell also received instructions on the use of shoe bombs from Briton Richard Reid, who in December 2001 tried to blow up an airliner with explosives planted in his shoes. But the plan was thwarted early in 2002 when a key al-Qa'ida operative was arrested in Southeast Asia. In the subsequent debriefings of this operative, enough information was gleaned to round up the terrorists involved in the plot. The Bush administration has not revealed the name of this al-Qa'ida operative. But The Weekend Australian has confirmed Mr Bush was almost certainly referring to Zaini Zakaria, a Malaysian recruited by Hambali and sent for pilot training by Mohammed. Zakaria was one of several Malaysians recruited to form a suicide cell for al-Qa'ida, and it is understood he and the others met bin Laden. Zakaria, who is mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report, was key to the second wave operation against the US planned by Mohammed. The Library Tower attack was planned to follow the September 11 attacks. Ken Conboy, whose book The Second Front is largely about Hambali, said revelations of the Library Tower plot came from several sources. "They knew about the plot well before Hambali was captured (in Thailand in 2003)," he said. Conboy said the Library Tower plans were underway before September 11. "The first people got wind of it in late 2001. By spring the next year, the Indonesians were looking into it. It was corroborated when they got Mohammed." Zakaria is now in detention in Malaysia. Two of the other Malaysian suicide cell recruits, Bashir bin Lap, known as Lillie, and Mohammed Farik bin Amin, known as Zubair, were arrested in Thailand with Hambali. Hambali is in US custody, in an undisclosed location, possibly Jordan. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 I wonder if credit for the capture of Hamball will be properly given to the Thais in the book. It certainly wasn't in this piece. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-02-11 05:42 |