Al-Qaeda network's 'resilience' raises fresh attack fears

THE mountains of the northwest Pakistani province of Waziristan, where President Pervez Musharaff’s writ does not run large, have become the hiding place of choice for al-Qaeda’s leadership.

In March of this year, some of the world’s most wanted terrorist suspects quietly slipped in to Waziristan for a clandestine summit that officials in Pakistan, Britain and Washington fear may preface a new series of al-Qaeda attacks.

Among those present was the British citizen Abu Issa al-Hindi, who was among those terrorist suspects arrested by police in raids across England earlier this month. Hindi, who is believed to specialise in reconnaissance, had travelled to Waziristan from London.

Also present were Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American who travelled from New York City, and, most tellingly, Adnan el-Shukrijumah who arrived from places unknown.

Babar was arrested by US officials in April, shortly after returning from the Waziristan planning session and has been charged with multiple terrorism offences, including attempting to buy explosives for use in bombing attacks in Britain.

However, Shukrijumah, who is one of the FBI’s ten most wanted terror suspects, remains at large and the bureau has offered a $5 million (2.7 million) reward for information leading to his capture.

Mr Musharaff told Time magazine that this meeting represented a gathering of "second string" al-Qaeda operatives.

"The personalities involved, the operations, the fact that a major explosives expert came here and went back, all this was extremely significant," said Mr Musharraf.

That chimes with US officials’ warnings earlier this month that, while a string of arrests in the US, Britain and Pakistan in recent months have disrupted al-Qaeda, it remains a resilient organisation capable of mounting fresh attacks as a new generation of terrorists rises to the top of the organisation’s chain of command.

A Pakistani military spokesman confirmed the gathering had taken place but preferred to describe it as a "discreet" meeting rather than as a "summit". He said that the information about Hindi’s visit came from Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, the al-Qaeda computer engineer who was captured on 13 July in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore.

Khan later led police to Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who had a $5 million (2.71 million) bounty on his head for his suspected involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Although a senior administration official said in a background briefing earlier this month that these and other subsequent arrests in Britain and Pakistan were "a strategic success against al-Qaeda, as opposed to the wrapping up tactically of a single cell", that might be too optimistic a verdict. "We should resist the temptation of inflating the importance of arrests," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, noting that the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a year ago prompted some officials in Washington to suggest that al-Qaeda had been dealt an all but mortal wound. That is clearly not the case, despite real counter-terrorism successes.

"We have to be very careful about being optimistic. This is going to be a long war," he said.

Shukrijumah is believed to be an asthmatic 29-year-old Arab-Guyanese bomb maker and pilot. Some officials quietly refer to him as the "new" Mohammed Atta, believing that he might play the same leading role in any future attack on the US as Atta did on 11 September. It was Atta who led and co-ordinated the terrorists’ activities once they were inside the US and officials fear that the Florida-raised Shukrijumah could fulfil a similar function.

Worse, they say, is that his fluent English and ability to pass as a Hispanic means that were he able to slip into the US under a false passport he might prove all but impossible to find, even though his name now appears on every available counter-terrorist watch list.

"He speaks English and has the ability to fit in and look innocuous," said one FBI agent. "He could certainly come back here, and nobody would know it." In April 2001 he travelled to Panama and stayed there for ten days before returning to the US. Panama and the US are holding joint-counter-terrorism training exercises this month, aiming at preventing any possible attack on the Panama Canal.

Shukrijumah, whose father was a hard-line, Wahhabist Saudi-Yemeni preacher at a mosque in Florida, was born in Guyana, but grew up in the United States. He took computer classes at Broward Community College in Florida and is believed to hold both Guyanese and Trinidadian passports and may also hold Canadian and Saudi passports.

He was named specifically by the FBI’s director Robert Mueller in a May press conference. Mr Mueller made a public appeal for any information available that might help the Bureau find the bomb-maker and since then it is thought that sightings have placed Shukrijumah everywhere from Niagara Falls to Honduras, leading one intelligence official to tell Time: "He’s kind of like Elvis. He seems to pop up all over the place." In the same month, US attorney general John Ashcroft described Shukrijumah as a possible "future facilitator of terrorist acts for al-Qaeda".

The fear in Washington is that the March meeting may have been the equivalent of the now infamous planning session that took place in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 that finalised details for the 11 September, 2001 attacks on New York City and the US capital.

"This was a meeting of a bunch of cold-blooded killers who are very skilled at what they do and have an intense desire to inflict an awful lot of pain and suffering on America," Time quoted one senior US official as saying.

Despite that verdict, Pakistani officials yesterday sought to play down the significance of the March meeting.

But earlier this month a senior US counter-terrorism official told the Washington Post al-Qaeda’s "resiliency and their ability to reconstitute is truly remarkable". Officials fear that a second generation of terrorist planners, less closely linked to the organisation’s core, is emerging.

"That this sort of meeting should take place is not entirely surprising," says Mr Hoffman. "But it’s disturbing that so much of al-Qaeda’s centralised command and control capability remains in place in Pakistan.

"Even though between two and four thousand al-Qaeda associates have been arrested, their ability to recruit clearly hasn’t been diminished and despite the unprecedented onslaught against them, this shows just how enormously determined, formidable and resilient al-Qaeda remains. They are saying this is ‘business as usual’."

Nonetheless, the Bush administration is keen to note that increased Pakistani co-operation is now bringing results. "Three years ago, Pakistan was not a fighter in the war on terrorism," said Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser.

"And here you have them able to take down terrorists and to provide information which then could be shared in the government, could then be shared with state and local officials who were on some of the conference calls and you could have an effective response to these terror threats."

Al-Hindi was one of thirteen suspects arrested in raids across Britain earlier this month. A Hindu who converted to Islam when he was 20, he is believed to have been a regular at Abu Mamza al-Masri’s Finsbury Park mosque in North London. In the early 1990s he travelled to Kashmir to fight alongside Muslim extremists who oppose Indian rule in the province.

"We know we’ve disrupted a plot, but we don’t know that we’ve derailed it," a senior counter-terrorism official told Time. "And we certainly don’t know that it’s the only plot."