Seven paragraphs down in a story in the Arab News this morning is this paragraph:
Reports from US intelligence sources quoted in London suggest that Britain was warned two months ago that Al-Qaeda was planning a “Madrid-style” attack on the London transport network. Captured Al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, who was arrested in Pakistan and who is now in the custody of the Americans, has apparently briefed US intelligence interrogators to this effect. Who is Al-Libbi? In May, he was the subject of a minor dispute between the U.S. and U.K., after President Bush hailed his arrest in Pakistan as a "critical victory in the war on terror":
According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.
British intelligence apparently believed that the U.S. had confused al-Libbi with another suspected terrrorist:
Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.
Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.
“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”
According to Brisard, the arrested man lacks the global reach of Al-Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, or Anas al-Liby. Although British intelligence has evidence of telephone calls between al-Libbi and operatives in the UK, he is not believed to be Al-Qaeda’s commander of operations in Europe, as reported. The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 2003. Last year he was named Pakistan’s most wanted man with a $350,000 (£185,000) price on his head.
No European or American intelligence expert contacted last week had heard of al-Libbi until a Pakistani intelligence report last year claimed he had taken over as head of operations after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s arrest. A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.”
It also appears that he also had some foreknowledge of the London attacks, which strengthens the theory of an al-Qaida link to the London operation. But if al-Libbi is so low level, how would he have known about such a major attack (assuming the story here is true...)?
Meanwhile, Egyptian authorities are holding the suspected bomb-maker in the London attacks, a chemistry expert who had left England shortly before the attacks and leased an apartment in his own name in Cairo. The chemist, Magdi al-Nashar, had studied in the U.S., at North Carolina State in 2000, and was teaching at Leeds University before the attacks. The international links just keep on coming... |
