Thursday, September 17, 2009

Guardian : Airline bomb plotters case threatened by US fears

Airline bomb plotters case threatened by US fears

Connections established with those behind failed attacks and senior figures in Osama bin Laden's network in Pakistan

Vikram Dodd and Lee Glendinning | September 8, 2009

Several months of high-level surveillance on the key suspects in the airline bomb plot was almost foiled by the nervousness of US authorities who "lost their nerve", according to Scotland Yard's then head of counter-terrorism operations.

Andy Hayman, who was assistant commissioner specialist operations in the Metropolitan police in 2006, today outlined how the suspects were being filmed, their purchases and rubbish monitored and cars bugged in the lead-up to their arrests in August 2006, but said the police operation in the UK came close to being undermined by anxiousness from the US that the plotters be arrested as soon as possible.

"At the very highest level, the Americans wanted to be reassured that this was not going to slip through our hands. I was briefing the home secretary, who was briefing Tony Blair, who was briefing George Bush..." he wrote in the Times today.

"Fearful for the safety of American lives, the US authorities had been getting edgy … We moved from having congenial conversations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations," Hayman wrote. "We thought they had managed to persuade them to hold back so we could develop new opportunities and get more evidence to present to the courts. But I was never convinced they were content with that position. In the end, I strongly suspect that they lost their nerve and had a hand in triggering the arrest in Pakistan."

The men were arrested in August 2006, just two days before it was feared they would stage a dry run of the plot – but the US had wanted the plotters arrested days earlier, fearing that British police would miss the start of the attack.

The former US homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, told the Guardian the US administration was on such a state of heightened alert about the plot that it turned back a plane in midair two days before the arrests, believing a terror suspect was on board.

Chertoff said of the plot: "This stood out as being of a very substantial dimension, advanced, specific and sophisticated and of a scale comparable to 9/11."

Al-Qaida and extremists in Pakistan devised and provided key technical knowledge for the 2006 airline bomb plot, British and US counter-terror officials believe.

Plot leaders Assad Sarwar and Abdulla Ali had made several trips to Pakistan. Sarwar had a telephone with multiple Sim cards and both men used international cards and public telephone boxes to make calls to Pakistan. They seemed to have knowledge of counter-terrorism techniques. "Their operational security was very, very good," a senior police officer said. "A large part of this plan was invented in Pakistan."

Woolwich crown court was told that Ali, 28, and Sarwar, 29, exchanged coded emails with terrorist masterminds in Pakistan after they visited the country in 2006. UK counter-terrorism officials believe one of those referred to by the codename "Paps" or "Papa" in the correspondence is Rashid Rauf, suspected of masterminding the plot. The emails also refer to his lieutenant sent to Britain in August 2006 to oversee the final stages of an al-Qaida plot aimed at causing mass murder and stunning the west.

Prosecutor Peter Wright QC told the court: "The tenor of the emails from Ali or Sarwar to Pakistan is of a progress report. The tenor of the emails from Pakistan is of instruction, command, direction to the men on the ground.

"They demonstrate also that Ali and Sarwar had entirely different but equally important roles to perform, and they were entirely under the control and direction of Pakistan."

The two men began to lay the groundwork for the airline plot when they returned to the UK from trips to Pakistan in December 2005.

In June 2006 Sarwar flew again to Pakistan, where he was taught how to refine hydrogen peroxide to the high concentration required to produce a bomb, and how to make the chemical detonator HMTD.

Giving evidence to the jury in his own defence, Sarwar told them of a method he had learned to calculate the strength of hydrogen peroxide. He told jurors that his tutor in Pakistan, a Kashmiri freedom fighter called Jameel Shah, had given him advice on handling HMTD and how to boil down the volatile hydrogen peroxide without injuring himself.

"You tend to place it in a large metal pot over a camping stove, keeping it at a low temperature," he said. "You need to monitor it constantly because if it gets too hot, it could catch fire.

"That's how they do it in Pakistan, in the outdoors."

Both Sarwar and Ali were in Pakistan for what police believe was terrorist training at the same time as members of the cell that attacked London on 7 July 2005. Ali was still Pakistan both on the day of attacks on the capital's transport system that killed 52 innocent people and at the time of the attempted attacks of 21 July.

After the two men were arrested along with six fellow plotters, investigators found links to a past terror plot. Ali had been in regular phone contact with one of the gang who tried to bomb London on 21 July 2005. There were several calls between telephones registered to Ali and to Mukhtar Ibrahim in the months running up to the failed suicide bombings. Ibrahim is serving a life sentence for the attempted attack.

UK counter-terrorism officials believe that a trip by Ibrahim to Pakistan in December 2004 for terrorist training was allegedly organised by a man known only as "Gabs" in the airline plot trial. He knew several of the plotters involved in the conspiracy to use bombs disguised as soft drinks to blow up seven transatlantic aircraft, the jury heard.

A naturalised British citizen born in Syria, "Gabs" lives in east London. He was tried and acquitted of a terrorist offence in 2004 but is accused by US authorities of a string of terrorism-related offences. They say he provided "material and logistical support to al-Qaida and other terrorist organisations" and facilitated "travel for recruits seeking to meet with al-Qaida leaders and take part in terrorist training".

They also accuse him of having been "in regular contact with UK-based Islamist extremists, involved in the radicalising of individuals in the UK through the distribution of extremist media" and of having trained at jihadi camps run by a militant Kashmiri group.

Tracked to his last known address, a woman who answered the door denied all knowledge of the man. The Guardian is not naming him for legal reasons.

A counter-terrorism source described Gabs as a shadowy figure and confirmed that he had been one of the factors that had led investigators to the terrorist cell behind the airline plot.

A senior British police source did not rule out the possibility that other people had been involved, but said they believed they had arrested the main conspirators. "We ripped the heart out of this one," he said.

The links between the airline plotters and previous terrorist conspiracies, plus the sophistication of the devices and plotting, led western counter-terrorism officials to believe al-Qaida was involved.

It was the arrest of Rashid Rauf in Pakistan under suspicion of being part of the conspiracy that led UK police to speed up their plans to arrest the other suspects. They feared that if the UK cell learned of Rauf's arrest they would believe their capture was imminent and either lash out or try to go to ground.

Rauf later escaped from Pakistani custody. He is thought to have been killed by a US drone strike in November 2008, but some believe he is still alive.

US intelligence believes the cell was directed by al-Qaida leaders, possibly Abu Obaidah al-Masri, who died of natural causes this year in Pakistan.

Seven of the accused refused to answer questions from detectives after their arrest. Their first accounts came only at the trial when they gave evidence in their own defence. Ali said he had worked in refugee camps on border between Pakistan and Afghanistan after the US invasion, and he decided that British and American foreign policy were the root causes of the suffering he witnessed both personally and through the media.

He would meet Sarwar, with whom he discussed politics and how to try to change things, and together they came to the idea of setting off explosions in Britain. Ali said he and Sarwar discussed a list of targets including Canary Wharf, Liverpool Street station and the Bank of England, "anywhere that is iconic and sensational". UK officials say the planning for any attack on these targets was less advanced than the airline plot.

Ali said that at one point in 2006 he was struggling to find a suitable device when Sarwar said he knew "someone in Pakistan who might be able to help us". Ali said this man had fought in Kashmir against Indian forces based there.

In his suicide video Ali says that warnings from the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to the west to leave Muslims alone had been ignored. The themes in his rhetoric chimed with those from other al-Qaida videos, notably Bin Laden's "foreign lands" speech, and also the video suicide note left by the 7 July bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan.

The strong connections between the convicted plotters and figures in Pakistan are part of the reason the British government has applied increasing public and private pressure on Pakistan to do more to tackle terrorism. Since the plot was disrupted in summer 2006, western intelligence officials both in the UK and the US have grown more fearful that further attacks on the west will be planned on Pakistani soil and carried out by people of Pakistani heritage. Pakistani officials reject these suggestions and say their country is being used as a scapegoat.