ISLAMABAD, 6 March 2003 — Al-Qaeda’s alleged terror architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in touch with Osama Bin Laden this year, and had letters from the elusive Al-Qaeda chief which indicated he was “in the region”, Pakistani security officials said yesterday.
“Khalid admitted he was in contact with Osama Bin Laden as late as this year, but insisted he was unaware of his whereabouts,” a senior government official told AFP, citing revelations by the Al-Qaeda lynchpin during three days of interrogations in Pakistan following his dramatic weekend capture.
“The contacts were made through messengers.”
He and Bin Laden had communicated through a complex chain of messengers, involving a combination of e-mail and couriers, a top security official said.
“He admitted to receiving Bin Laden’s messages this year,” the security official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some of those messages were in the form of handwritten letters from Bin Laden, found in the room where Sheikh Mohammed was sleeping when he was nabbed in a pre-dawn raid Saturday.
“There is material like letters and other things, which were in possession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that strongly suggest Bin Laden is alive and may be hiding in the region,” the security official said.
“Pakistani interrogators believe that the writing in the letter matches that of Osama Bin Laden.”
So far Sheikh Mohammed had insisted he was unaware of Bin Laden’s exact location.
“But we believe he knows it and will come out with the truth during the interrogation by US agents,” the security official said.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat, however, said the Al-Qaeda chief, who has eluded a massive US-led manhunt for 18 months, was “not in Pakistan”.
Sheikh Mohammed’s capture is the biggest coup in the US-led, 18-month war on terrorism and has given Al-Qaeda hunters a treasure trove of data.
“A laptop, a satellite phone, diaries as well as these letters provide the most valuable information to date on Al-Qaeda’s network and its financial empire,” a senior government official said.
A cellular phone and lists of telephone numbers were also found.
E-mail messages on the laptop were written in code, and US communications experts were frantically deciphering the messages in an effort to foil terror attacks Sheikh Mohammed was said to have in the pipeline.
“The information is vital not just for Pakistan but for the international community in the fight against terrorism,” Hayat said.
Sheikh Mohammed was captured with Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, a Saudi national accused of funding the Sept. 11 hijackers, in a pre-dawn swoop Saturday in the northern city of Rawalpindi. They were airlifted out of Pakistan Tuesday.
Hayat foreshadowed further arrests as a result of their detention.
With their capture “Al-Qaeda has been weakened and is gradually crumbling,” the minister said.
“Khalid Sheikh was the most important pillar of the network, and the other suspect was the main financier,” he said.
Sheikh Mohammed, born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents, has been dubbed by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as “the brains” behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks for his alleged logistical planning and engineering of the atrocities that killed some 3,000 people.
He is considered Al-Qaeda’s No. 3 after Bin Laden and the Egyptian physician Ayman Al-Zawahri, who is also at large.
Sheikh Mohammed and Al-Zawahri were grilled by US and Pakistani investigators for three days before being whisked to a US detention center at Bagram air base in Afghanistan early Tuesday.
Hayat said authorities now have a grip on Al-Qaeda’s methods of operation, support networks, and financial sources in Pakistan. “Pakistani agencies now have valuable information to crack down on whatever their linkages are in Pakistan, active or sleeping.” Sheikh Mohammed had also revealed that Al-Qaeda cells in Pakistan had been planning attacks on “soft” Western targets in Pakistan, an official familiar with the interrogations told AFP.
US officials have also said he was planning attacks on targets in the United States.
He had initially given conflicting accounts on the network chief’s fate, saying first that he was alive then that he may be dead as he had had no contact with him for six months. A Pakistani man living in the house where the Al-Qaeda pair were caught appeared in an anti-terrorism court Tuesday and was charged with illegal weapons possession, police said.
