US and Pakistani authorities
fear Al Qaeda is plotting a new major attack after a March
“terrorist summit” in Pakistan, Time magazine
reported.
Authorities discovered
what President General Pervez Musharraf described as a
“second string” of terrorist leaders that
met in South Waziristan in March 2004, the magazine reports
in its Monday issue.
“The personalities
involved, the operations, the fact that a major explosives
expert came here and went back,” Gen Musharraf said,
“all this was extremely significant”.
However, army spokesman
Major General Shaukat Sultan played down the report, saying
there was no summit. He said Shakai in South Waziristan
was used as a training area for Al Qaeda until militants
and tribal allies were forced out by the military in June.
According to Gen Sultan, President Musharraf told Time
that Pakistani Al Qaeda operative and computer engineer
Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, captured last month, had met
“discreetly” in Lahore with Musa al Hindi,
arrested this month in Britain.
Khan had also met an unnamed
weapons expert, Gen Sultan said, possibly a reference
to Adnan el Shukrijumah, identified by Time as a bombmaker
and commercial pilot.
A US official described
the participants of the reported summit as “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”.
Some US officials fear
the meeting could have been a key planning session ahead
of a major attack, according to the magazine, similar
to the way a 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur was ahead of
the September 11 attacks in the United States that killed
nearly 3,000 people. The participants of the “terrorist
summit” included al Hindi, the Indian surveillance
specialist living in Britain; Shukrijumah, who is of Arab-Guyanese
origin; and Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American
who arrived at the summit with cash, sleeping bags and
ponchos, the magazine reported.
Al Hindi is currently under
arrest in Britain, and Mohammed Babar was arrested in
New York in April. Others, including Shukrijumah, 29,
are still at large.
Shukrijumah “speaks
English and has the ability to fit in and look innocuous,”
an FBI agent told Time. “He could certainly come
back (in the United States), and nobody would know it.”
Shukrijumah was born in
Guyana and raised in Florida, where his late father, a
Saudi-Yemeni cleric, preached hard-line Wahhabism at a
small mosque.
Shukrijumah reportedly
holds passports from Guyana and Trinidad, and may also
have Canadian and Saudi passports. He can easily pass
for Hispanic and authorities fear he may cross the Canadian
or Mexican borders, US officials told the magazine.
FBI agents told Time that
Shukrijumah could be the next Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian
ringleader of the September 11 attacks.
In Washington, US Senator
Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
praised Gen Musharraf in an interview with NBC television
network.
“President Musharraf
is an absolute hero, along with the intelligence folks
that he has,” Roberts said. “And they’re
lashed up with our CIA. They’re doing a very good
job.”
He refused to discuss the
Time magazine report, but did say the terrorists are likely
“going to go back to heavy motorised vehicles and
explosions, because that’s what we they do best.
Maybe airplanes. And then you get into a whole panoply
of all sorts of possibilities: ports, cyber attacks, agro-terrorism,
so on and so forth
