ISLAMABAD, 7 March 2003 — Reports that captured Al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in February were purely speculative, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
“It is sheer conjecture,” the official, on the team that interrogated Mohammed during his three days in captivity in Pakistan, told AFP.
Khalid had only arrived in Rawalpindi, the crowded military garrison city next to Islamabad, a few hours before his capture in a dramatic pre-dawn swoop Saturday by US and Pakistani intelligence commandoes.
“The fact is that Khalid was caught only hours after his arrival in Rawalpindi,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
The New York Times reported that Khalid had met Bin Laden, the terror network’s chief, in February possibly in Rawalpindi.
The Times also said officials in Washington knew of no specific information to show the two men had recently met.
The Pakistani intelligence official said Khalid had been in the southwest province of Balochistan in February, during which he narrowly escaped a raid on an Egyptian Al-Qaeda suspect’s hide-out.
Meanwhile, according to another intelligence official Khalid told investigators Bin Laden is in good health and living in the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Arabic-language Al-Jazeera channel also reported that Bin Laden is living in Pakistan under the protection of Islamists.
Khalid claimed he met Bin Laden just weeks ago after arranging a rendezvous through a complicated network of phone calls, runners and intermediaries.
The meeting took place somewhere in the southwestern Balochistan province or amid the rugged peaks that run like a seam along the Afghan border.
The official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said he was one of a team of Pakistani and CIA agents who interrogated Khalid for hours after he was nabbed in a stunning pre-dawn raid in Rawalpindi on Saturday.
“He said proudly, ‘the sheikh is a hero of Islam and I am his tiny servant. Life, family, money, everything can be sacrificed for the sheikh,”’ said the intelligence official, who did not reveal what Khalid and Bin Laden discussed.
Khalid told his interrogators he didn’t know Bin Laden’s exact whereabouts, but that he was in the remote region.
In what would appear to corroborate Khalid’s information, AP received similar information on Monday from a former intelligence chief of Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban regime.
In a telephone interview from Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar, he said Bin Laden had been seen in South Waziristan in Balochistan province less than two months ago. Bin Laden was meeting with Taleban members, he said.
His report could not be independently verified, but both US Special Forces and Pakistani soldiers are in South Waziristan trying to flush out Taleban and Al-Qaeda fugitives.
Col. Roger King, a US military spokesman in Afghanistan, also said US authorities believe Bin Laden is in “this general region — Afghanistan and the countries that surround it.”
Several sources say Bin Laden moves with only a small number of guards. He changes his location nightly and never uses satellite telephones that could be used to pinpoint his location.
Instead, he reportedly sends messages through intermediaries to a selected person who makes telephone calls on his behalf, according to another former Taleban interviewed by AP in the country’s remote tribal regions.
Another intelligence official told AP that a raid was carried out on a house in Wana in South Waziristan earlier this year after a tip off was received that Bin Laden’s top lieutenant, Ayman Al-Zawahri was there.
It resulted in the arrest of some Afghan Taleban, but not Al-Zawahri, who has been sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court.
Pakistan officials have not commented on the latest claims about Bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Interior Ministry spokesman Iftikhar Ahmad said: “We cannot say that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan. He (Bin Laden) would have been arrested if he had been here.”
Western diplomats say it’s intriguing that Khalid was arrested in a Rawalpindi neighborhood, where army generals and top military officials live.
Rawalpindi is a congested city of about 4 million people adjacent to the headquarters of the Pakistan Army and home of its chief, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Khalid was arrested in the house of Ahmed Abdul Qadus, an activist of Jamaat-e-Islami.
Arab and Pakistani sources have told AP Khalid may have been trying to raise money for terrorist attacks against US interests, either outside the region or within Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Khalid has acted as a fundraiser before. He and his brother ran an Islamic charity in the northwestern city of Peshawar, not far from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in the 1980s.
They financed insurgents and taught students at Arabic-language madrases in Peshawar and in nearby Pubbi, including the Jalozai Refugee camp, where many Arabs lived.
Other Arab warriors lived in nearby Shamshatoo camp, which was run by renegade rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami group.
Washington has labeled Hekmatyar a terrorist and US Special Forces are hunting him in Afghanistan.
A former Hekmatyar loyalist — a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship — who identified himself as Abu Yusuf, said Khalid traveled freely throughout Pakistan and only feared US intelligence agents who had previously tipped off Pakistani security officials to make raids and arrests.
One such tip led to a raid in southern Karachi last Sept. 10 in which Khalid’s wife and two small children were arrested, Abu Yusuf said.
The next day — exactly one year after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States — Ramzi Binalshibh, a would-be hijacker who could not get into the United States, was captured in the southern port city of Karachi. He was an aide to Khalid and accused of being a key moneyman for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Binalshibh also was the former roommate of hijacker Mohammed Atta.
Pakistani officials said an arrest made in southwestern Balochistan’s capital Quetta helped police trace Khalid to Rawalpindi. However other reports say US intelligence traced a telephone call that led police to Khalid.
A second Al-Qaeda suspect, Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hisawi, a Saudi national, was arrested with Mohammed, along with Ahmed Abdul Qadus. Al-Hisawi was suspected of financing the Sept. 11 attacks. He was also said to be the moneyman for Al-Zawahri and may have been trying to contact the Egyptian fugitive at the time of his arrest.
