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Alleged 9/11 mastermind flown to US base in Afghanistan

Alleged al-Qaeda terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan early Tuesday after three days of interrogation in Pakistan, during which he gave contradictory accounts of Osama bin Laden's fate, officials said.

"We have completed our investigation and the man has been flown out of Pakistan," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told AFP.

Mohammed, along with another al-Qaeda suspect arrested in the pre-dawn raid Saturday, was handed over into US custody and flown to the US base at Bagram north of Kabul after permission was granted by Kuwait, security officials said.

"He was flown early Tuesday to Bagram," a top Pakistani security official told AFP.

A Western official identified his co-captive as a Saudi national.

Bagram air base, a sprawling Soviet-era facility 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the capital Kabul, is the hub of US military-led operations in Afghanistan where several top al-Qaeda and Taliban figures have been held, including the network's South East Asia chief Omar al-Farooq.

Mohammed's capture is the biggest coup of the 18-month old war on terrorism.

He is believed to be al-Qaeda's operational commander and the architect of the September 11 terror attacks in the US that killed more than 3,000 people.

Dubbed Osama bin Laden's "007", he was also in the midst of planning fresh terror strikes against United States targets both in the US and Pakistan, according to intelligence officials.

Believed to be the third most senior figure in al-Qaeda after bin Laden and Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, interrogators are hoping he will lead them to bin Laden, whose whereabouts since the US began bombing Afghanistan in late 2001 remain a mystery.

But during interrogation in Pakistan Mohammed gave conflicting statements on the elusive terror network chief.

"Initially he said bin Laden was alive. But later he changed his statement and said bin Laden was dead because he had had no contact with the man during the past six months," an official familiar with the investigation told AFP.

"He said he used to maintain contacts with bin Laden through a chain of messengers via email, who would deliver the message to bin Laden without telling Mohammed his whereabouts."

Most Western intelligence agents believe bin Laden is alive and hiding somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghan border region.

 

Within hours of his transfer to Afghanistan, pamphlets offering financial rewards for al-Zawahri's capture were airdropped over the south-east Afghan border town of Spin Boldak.

 

Mohammed, interrogated since Saturday by Pakistani intelligence agents and US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigators, has proven hard to crack, the official said.

"It is very difficult and cumbersome to penetrate the psyche of a hardened person like him," he said.

He told interrogators al-Qaeda cells were planning to hit "soft targets" in Pakistan.

"He says they were planning to hit soft targets in Pakistan, maybe Western individuals," the official close to the investigation told AFP.

Mohammed also said he knew the identity of the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded within a week of his abduction in the southern city of Karachi in January 2002.

Investigators were also scanning laptops and documents found on Mohammed when he was captured sleeping in a house in the northern city of Rawalpindi.

"From the documents seized it appears the man was running the network's financial empire in this region," the intelligence official said.

"They have sizeable resources, that is what we can say at the moment."

 

Also found were lists of telephone numbers, US intelligence officials said.

Mohammed's arrest has elated the administration of President George W. Bush. He had been sought by the US since his indictment in 1996 over a plot to blow up commercial airliners over the Pacific a year earlier.

He is also linked to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, for which his nephew Ramzi Yousef was convicted, the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on a US ship in Yemen in 2000. 

 

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