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| Africa North |
| How Mombasa shaped blast mastermind |
| 2011-01-29 |
| [The Nation (Nairobi)] Around 2000, Osama bin Laden was visiting a guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when one of his aides approached a Tanzanian man who was staying there. The aide said bin Laden had personally requested that the man, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani , become one of his bodyguards. Ghailani accepted the offer, was given an AK-47 assault rifle, and soon joined a tight cadre of about 15 bodyguards working for bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, according to Ghailani's recollection, as described in an FBI document. He also became bin Laden's cook, taking on a task that most of the other "brothers" shunned, the FBI summary quotes him as saying. "Most of them didn't like to cook," Ghailani explained. Ghailani, 36, was sentenced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan for conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property, stemming from his trial in the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. He was also acquitted of more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy. Ghailani's lawyers have said he was a naïve "kid" who was duped into assisting in the plot, while prosecutors have called him a terrorist with "the blood of hundreds on his hands." Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in a ruling on Friday last week that there was sufficient evidence that Ghailani was a "knowing and willing" participant, and that he could have been convicted of all 224 murders. Still, the jury saw only a snapshot of Ghailani's life, focusing on the period before the attacks. It did not learn that, according to prosecutors, he ended up training with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; guarding bin Laden; meeting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and seeing Zacarias Moussaoui; and encountering operatives who were among the 9/11 hijackers. Like nobody's business A fuller story of his life, encompassing Ghailani's childhood in Zanzibar and his association with Al Qaeda after the attacks, offers insight into how he became a trusted aide to bin Laden, and why American authorities saw him as a potential intelligence asset after his arrest in 2004. He grew up in Zanzibar, a short ferry ride from the Tanzanian mainland, in a concrete house with a roof of corrugated iron sheets. His parents divorced, and although he lived with his mother, he had a close relationship with his father, who ran a small restaurant. He also visited his grandfather, who lived in a nearby village and grew coconuts, cloves and other items for the local market. "He was nice to me, and easy to know," Ghailani told a court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr Gregory B. Saathoff, who evaluated him last year. Although Ghailani's parents were not particularly religious, Ghailani recalled that his grandfather took him to a mosque. His mother, Bimkubwa Said Abdalla, said in a recent interview in Zanzibar that she remembered how her son learned to read the Koran "like nobody's business." Ms Abdalla, a nurse midwife by profession who works in a hospital in Zanzibar, recalled her son as a boy who studied hard and completed high school, but then fell in with the "wrong kind of people." Still more at the site, if you're interested... |
| Posted by:Fred |