WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, 17 September — The United States took custody of key Al-Qaeda suspect Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan and flew him and four other suspects to a secret location outside that country, US and Pakistani officials said yesterday.
The US officials told reporters that Binalshibh, captured last week in Karachi and accused of playing a key role in planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, was not taken to the United States.
“We have control of him. We’re talking to him,” said one US official, who asked not to be identified. “We have handed over a total of five suspects to the US authorities, including Binalshibh. They have been handed over to the United States and they must have been flown out of Pakistan,” Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the spokesman for Pakistan’s military government, told reporters in Karachi.
US President George W. Bush said Binalshibh’s arrest shows Americans had not grown weary of the war on terrorism but in fact are as determined as ever. “He’s the one that thought he was going to be the 20th bomber,” Bush said in Davenport, Iowa.
Pakistani police assisted by the FBI raided an apartment block in Karachi and arrested several Al-Qaeda suspects. Earlier yesterday, Pakistani Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said that while Pakistan would hand over the suspects, “they have to be produced before a magistrate and if he is satisfied with legalities the extradition would take place.”
In New York, the US authorities have detained a sixth accused member of Al-Qaeda cell broken up last week who was to appear in court yesterday, officials said. The latest suspect, Mukhtar Al-Bakri, like the others born in the United States but of Yemeni descent, was arrested in Bahrain but gave himself up to US authorities there after denying any connection to Al-Qaeda.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detained five other American-born Arabs accused of being part of the Al-Qaeda sleeper cell in the steel town of Lackawanna, outside of Buffalo, New York, state last Friday. The five others — Faysal Galab, Sahim Alwan, Yahya Goba, Shafel Mosed, and Yasein Taher — were arraigned in Buffalo last Saturday.
Al-Bakri was arrested on Sept. 10 by Bahraini police at a hotel in Manama, Bahrain. He was there to be married, according to a hotel employee. “He refuted the charges against him and said he was ready to voluntarily face investigation in the United States where he had been taken,” said a diplomat close to the investigation in Bahrain.
The five other suspects were arrested after a yearlong investigation and after it was learned they had traveled to Afghanistan and trained in an Al-Qaeda camp in the spring and summer of 2001. Upon their return to the United States, they allegedly formed what one federal agent called a “sleeper cell,” awaiting an order for an attack on American targets.
