Wanted Women by Deborah Scroggins

Author:Deborah Scroggins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Twenty-two

Relentless police work and international intelligence resulted in the roundup of more and more people in KSM’s network and related groups.

In June, the police arrested Ramzi Yousef’s brother, Abdul Karim Mehmood, and his sister’s husband, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi militant Dawood Badani, in connection with an attempted assassination of Karachi’s corps commander. Abdul Karim—who also went by the name Musab Aruchi—had a U.S. bounty of $1 million on his head, and Pakistani intelligence agents told the Washington Post that he was in touch with people planning attacks on financial institutions in New York and Washington. “It seems that this family,” one agent said about the al-Baluchi, “has something in their genes against the icons of financial power in the U.S.”

The interrogation of Abdul Karim led to the arrest on July 13 of twenty-five-year-old Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert from Karachi who manned an al-Qaeda communications center. Police found files in Khan’s computer containing the detailed surveillance of financial buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, including the Prudential Building and the International Monetary Fund.

Pakistani intelligence decided to use the young computer whiz in a sting. Over the weekend of July 24–25, they had him send e-mails to all his contacts. When the replies came in, they helped the authorities track down dozens of his accomplices.

In Pakistan, Khan led the CIA and Pakistani police to the hideout, in Gujarat, of Ahmed Khalfan Gailani. Gailani was the Tanzanian who had helped plot the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the man whom Aafia was alleged to have supervised buying diamonds in Liberia. He had a $10 million U.S. reward on his head, and he was captured with his Uzbek wife after a fourteen-hour gunfight.

In Britain, the e-mails Khan received prompted police to arrest twelve men of mainly Pakistani descent on suspicion of planning to attack Heathrow Airport—the operation that Aafia’s husband, Ali, had taken over from the imprisoned KSM before Ali, too, was arrested. The e-mails led to the capture of Dhiren Barot, a British former airline agent and Hindu convert to Islam who had become one of KSM’s top secret operatives, and of Babar Ahmad, the webmaster of the jihadi Web sites www.azzam.com and www.qoqaz.com, both of which Aafia had frequented before 9/11.

Aafia almost certainly knew the webmaster, Babar Ahmad—at least by e-mail. She frequently read www.azzam.com, and in the summer of 2001 she was probably translating Abdullah Azzam’s book The Maidens of Paradise for the Web site. Babar Ahmad was about Aafia’s age, and he worked closely with pro-jihadi activists in the United States, including some of Aafia’s friends at Benevolence International. The name of the Florida jihadi Adnan Shukrijumah appeared in official comments on the wave of arrests, and credit card and telephone records indicated that Shukrijumah might have scouted out the Prudential Building and other sites and might have written the surveillance reports found in Khan’s computer.

Some close observers of the roundup speculated that Aafia might be arrested next.

Noting

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