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| Britain | ||
| Airliner bomb trial: The al-Qaeda connection | ||
| 2008-09-09 | ||
| The liquid bomb plotters shared the same al-Qaeda bomb maker as the July 7 and July 21 suicide gangs, intelligence agencies believe. That man, Abu Ubaida al-Masri, apparently came up with a novel design of home-made detonator that would be utilised in the attacks. Although intelligence services know what al-Masri looks like and have a photograph of him, they do not know his true identity. Al-Masri, which is not his real name, has been described as being in his mid-forties, 5ft 7ins tall, muscular and tanned, with greying black hair and a greying beard. He is also missing two fingers, probably as the result of a bomb explosion in Chechnya during the 1990s. Al-Masri was among a contingent of Egyptians who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and afterwards travelled to Bosnia and Chechnya before arriving in Britain. By 1995 he was in Munich, Germany, using an alias and asking for asylum. The claim was rejected and he was jailed pending deportation, then released. He returned to Afghanistan in 2000, serving as an instructor at a training camp near Kabul, where he taught about explosives, artillery and mapping. The CIA now believes that al-Masri is dead, probably from hepatitis C earlier this year. He was just one of the links between the liquid bomb plot gang and the July 7 and July 21 bombers.
Security sources believe Rauf, who knew the leader of the July 21 bombers, Muktar Ibrahim, was the man who housed the liquid bomb plot gang as they arrived at a safe-house in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, where he worked as a travelling salesman. Investigators believe he acted as a staging post and sent the bombers up to the mountains of the lawless tribal areas to meet with al-Qaeda's bomb-makers. It was Rauf's sudden arrest in Pakistan which led to the rounding up of the airlines terror cell in Britain as the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command feared their operation could be exposed. But Britain was unable to get him extradited and 16 months after his arrest he disappeared from custody in a bizarre escape after a court hearing. Rauf's family run a bakery in Birmingham. His father was a religious judge in Kashmir, before he moved to Britain in the 1980s, later setting up an Islamic charity called Crescent Relief. | ||
| Posted by:Fred |