Tag: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

28 January 2001

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

In Dubai, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (Ammar al-Baluchi) deposits $5,000 into the Citibank account of Saudi Hani Hanjour. Hanjour, who would fly the plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, was the last of the four pilots to come onboard with the plot and the only Saudi amongst the pilots.

Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and often called “Cousin Ali” by the other hijackers, was located in the United Arab Emirates, and thus was the secure (and less suspicious) financial link between al Qaeda and the hijackers in the United States (rather than KSM in Pakistan).

He was captured in a police raid in Karachi, Pakistan on April 30, 2003, and is now in Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

4 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah (the pilots who flew the 9/11 planes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) both fly internationally on the same day (but separately), Atta leaving the United States for the first time since he arrived in June 2000.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed discouraged external travel except for operational purposes, the two were so confident of their operational security that they both left the country soon after receiving their commercial pilot’s licenses.

Atta had overstayed his tourist visa by one month. He flew from Tampa to Madrid, returning on January 10, again gaining entry into the U.S.

Jarrah was already in Lebanon visiting his family. He flew Olympic Airlines from Beirut to Athens; and then from Athens to Dusseldorf, Germany. There he was met by Aysel Senguen, his common law wife, and the two flew from Dusseldorf to Newark, New Jersey, continuing on to Tampa. Senguen, a German national, left the United States on January 15, returning to Germany.

30 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, is identified by an al Qaeda captive from a photograph and labeled an “associate” of Osama bin Laden.

He is subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury the next month. The FBI and U.S. Attorney do not really know who KSM is, other than as a financier of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and an accomplice in Ramzi Yousef’s activities in the Philippines. The indictment is sealed—secret—only to be opened once KSM is in custody.

18 December 1986

Posted on by William Arkin
McNair Hall at North Carolina A&T State University

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) graduates with an engineering degree from North Carolina A&T University, Jesse Jackson’s alma mater.

KSM had entered the United States four years earlier, first attending Chowan College in Murfreesboro to improve his English language proficiency. During his time in America, KSM mostly hung out with other Middle Eastern students. But he also attended lectures at East Coast mosques promoting the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which had invaded the country at the end of 1979. Those lectures are now thought to have included fundraising trips by Aymen al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who were free to travel in the U.S. (Azzam was Osama bin Laden’s intellectual mentor.)

With a Pakistani passport, but having grown up in Kuwait (as the son of an oil industry guest worker), KSM was already a man of the world. And after he graduated, he went from Kuwait to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he joined his brother, Zahed, who ran one of many NGOs providing aid and relief for fighters and refugees from Afghanistan.

11 December 1994

Posted on by William Arkin
Philippines Air plane

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s first international terrorist act is probably carried out when a bomb goes off on a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo, via Mactan–Cebu International Airport. The small bomb is built and planted by Ramzi Yousef, the attacker of the World Trade Center in February 1993.

With false identification papers (he is an internationally-wanted man), Ramzi Yousef boards the flight in Manila. Onboard, sitting in seat 26K, he assembles a small bomb using nitrocellulose explosive that he secreted away in a contact lens cleaner bottle, with a Casio watch as the timer and initiator. He then puts the bomb in the life jacket pouch underneath the seat. When the plane lands in Cebu, Yousef debarks, and Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami boards the flight and takes his seat. At cruising altitude over the Sea of Japan, the Casio alarm ignites the filament in the bomb and it detonates, killing Ikegami and blowing a hole in the fuselage. The pilot manages to bring the flight down for an emergency landing.

Though most histories credit Yousef with masterminding the plot, new information indicates that the attack on Philippine Airlines flight 434 (a Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet) was conceived and directed by KSM. The 9/11 planes operation then evolves from bombs planted on planes so that they would explode over water to using the planes themselves as missiles to strike objects on land.

8 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Hani Hanjour, pilot of the plane that attacked the Pentagon, arrives in San Diego, California from Dubai (via Paris and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport).

The Saudi is sent to San Diego by al Qaeda to pick up Nawaf al-Hazmi—part of the San Diego duo of Khalid al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, the original two planes’ operatives sent to the United States in January 2000. They had been picked as pilots by Osama bin Laden, but neither managed to obtain pilots licenses, and Mihdhar left the U.S. six months later (only to return in July 2001). Nawaf, who could not speak English, needed a chaperone, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed feared that his closeness to the Muslim community ran the risk of exposing him, not to the FBI but to Saudi intelligence.

Hanjour, the only hijacker/pilot with experience in the United States, then drives with al-Hazmi to Arizona, where he had previously lived, and undertakes additional flight training to brush up on his skills. The two then relocate to Northern Virginia.

25 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The “Hamburg Four” begin their journey to join al Qaeda, ultimately being assigned to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “planes operation.”

Ziad Jarrah flies from Hamburg, Germany to Karachi, Pakistan via Istanbul, on Turkish Airlines flight 1662 and the 1056, the first of the “Hamburg Four” to fly to Afghanistan. He stays in Pakistan for two months.

According to the interrogations of Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the four (and now in Guantanamo), sometime in 1999, the four decided to act on their beliefs and to pursue jihad against the Russians in Chechnya. They were advised that it was difficult to get to Chechnya and that they should go to Afghanistan first. The four then traveled separately to Quetta in Pakistan, meeting with a trusted representative, who arranged their passage to Kandahar.

In Afghanistan, the four have an audience with Osama bin Laden and pledge loyalty, knowing that they were volunteering for a martyrdom operation. They were instructed to enroll in flight training. Mohammed Atta was chosen to lead the group, and before they left Afghanistan, he met with bin Laden and received a preliminary list of targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. (See 911 Commission, p. 166; 911 Commission, Staff Statement 16, p. 3)

14 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

A year before 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) is appointed head of all media operations for al Qaeda. Between then and the attacks, he works with London and other Arab-based media in transmitting statements and distributing videos and cassettes.

The 34-year-old Pakistani national, who was raised in Kuwait and went to college in the United States, was by then an experienced operator for Osama bin Laden, having worked in Islamic aid organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan during and after the Soviet occupation and then playing a hand in various plots, including the 1998 African embassy bombings.

Though indicted for terrorist conspiracy in 1996 by the Southern District of New York (for a plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific), and even after a failed rendition attempt by the FBI, he is not a household-name terrorist, not even amongst CIA analysts, FBI investigators, or experts. And yet he is now universally accepted to have been the conceiver of the airline plot and the “teacher” of the Hamburg Three (Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah) with regard to operational security and preparing their year-and-a-half long preparations in the United States.

23 September 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Ramzi Binalshibh

 

Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the original “Hamburg four,” and the only one of four to be denied a visa for the United States, first arrives in Germany with a plea for political asylum, claiming illegal detention and torture in his native Sudan.

He is granted asylum in Germany, but in fact, Binalshibh was born in Yemen. That is the reason for his ultimately being denied a visa to the U.S. The poorer Yemenis, in contrast with Saudis and Gulf state nationals, were generally thought to be seeking to come to the United States to illegally emigrate. Denied a visa, from his German base Binalshibh would become the communications link between Mohammed Atta (the leader of the hijackers in the United States) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of the plot, located in Pakistan). Thus the German location would prove fortuitous, for communications between the U.S. and Germany were not routinely monitored and the German location helped the hijackers evade detection. Binalshibh would ultimately leave Germany on September 5, just days before the 9/11 attacks, traveling to Afghanistan before being captured a year later.

On September 11, 2002, two al Qaeda suspects were killed and five were captured after Pakistani police stormed an apartment in Karachi. Binalshibh is subsequently transported to “black sites” and tortured, eventually moved to Guantanamo Bay, where he is held today.