The broken door of the two-story villa in an upper-middle-class district of this city is the only outward sign that it was a hideout for suspected terrorists where the authorities say they captured a major leader of Al Qaeda, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
It was here in the city’s Westridge district that the Pakistani authorities announced the arrest of Mohammed, along with an unidentified Middle Eastern man and a Pakistani man, Ahmed Qadoos. The home belongs to Qadoos’ elderly parents, but the son, 42, also lived there with his wife and two children.
Mohammed, who is believed to have been the operational planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, was quickly handed over to the U.S. for questioning at an undisclosed foreign location. Unlike the shootout last fall that resulted in the arrest of another top Al Qaeda member, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohammed’s arrest came without incident.
Early Saturday morning, Mohammed’s pursuers finally found the suspect who had long eluded them. Mohammed was pulled from his sleep to be photographed by police: beardless, seemingly dazed, wearing a loose-fitting white T-shirt against the backdrop of an apartment with paint peeling from the walls.
The long chase was over: The man whose alleged involvement in planning terrorist attacks was a key factor in last month’s spike upwards in the U.S. terror alert was in American hands.
Mohammed had been hiding in the Rawalpindi house “for quite some time,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat, said Sunday.
Mohammed’s capture ended one of the most intense manhunts since Sept. 11, 2001, delivering the man believed to have the most detailed knowledge of the plot for those attacks and others during the last 18 months.
Although U.S. officials had been frustrated in earlier attempts to seize the operations chieftain of Al Qaeda, intelligence and law-enforcement officials said they kept receiving solid leads about his whereabouts after Sept. 11, in large part because Mohammed stayed in active communication with Al Qaeda members around the world. He allegedly continued to be the network’s operational commander, using couriers, e-mail and coded telephone messages.
In the past year, according to interviews with officials and intelligence reports, Mohammed gave instructions and provided funding to Al Qaeda lieutenants worldwide. During interrogations, many Al Qaeda detainees revealed being in communication with Mohammed.
Sunday, counterterrorism officials said Mohammed was in part responsible for the U.S. government’s decision last month to raise the terror-alert level from yellow to orange–a heightened alert that has since been rescinded.
“Some of the information did lead back to him, and anything that leads back to him in the past is stuff that causes you to take it seriously,” one official said Sunday. “There were indications that he was involved in near-term planning.”
Suspect’s kin counter reports
Details of Mohammed’s arrest remained somewhat murky, according to interviews with U.S. and Pakistani authorities. Qadoos, one of the men arrested with Mohammed, is the son of Mah Laqa, a neighborhood leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest of Pakistan’s Islamic political parties.
In interviews, Qadoos’ family denied being involved with Al Qaeda, and his relatives disputed that Mohammed had been arrested in the house, which Qadoos’ parents own.
Hayat said Mohammed was apprehended in the house, adding, “In such cases, the families always proclaim innocence.”
Qadoos’ sister, Qudsia Khanum, 44, said more than 20 agents had entered the family home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday. She said the raiding agents did not identify themselves and that they they ransacked the house, seizing what she said were tapes of the Koran and a new computer that she said was filled with children’s electronic games.
Some U.S. law-enforcement officials said cellular telephones and other items seized in the arrest contained valuable intelligence.
Before moving to Rawalpindi earlier in the winter, Mohammed had been spotted in different cities in Pakistan.
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Intelligence officials said they had penetrated his circle deeply enough in recent weeks to conclude that Mohammed was planning terrorist operations inside the United States — in the “near term,” as one official described it.
One target was New York City, the officials said, possibly involving the revival of a discarded plan that was first discussed in the months before the World Trade Center attacks in September 2001. Before that, Mohammed had considered attacks on the city’s gas stations, bridges, hotels and power plants, officials said.
A renewed effort by Mohammed set off alarms because of another intelligence finding about him. According to intelligence officials, he had grown interested in radiological devices, expressed keen interest in obtaining poisons and toxins, and urged other Al Qaeda extremists to launch a more intensive effort in developing weapons of mass destruction.
An elusive quarry
In recent weeks, concern about the threat posed by Mohammed increased as intelligence officials focused more closely on his suspected presence in Pakistan and began to collect reliable information about his activities.
But Mohammed had a reputation as an elusive quarry in the global manhunt for followers of Al Qaeda. Since the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence repeatedly trailed Mohammed to specific hideouts only to lose him in the vastness of Central Asia and the Middle East. He slipped away with the help of confederates, sometimes in disguise and often carrying as many as 20 different passports.
The closest “near miss,” as intelligence officials referred to their unsuccessful efforts to catch Mohammed, occurred in September 2002, a few days after Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network, broadcast an interview with Mohammed and Binalshibh, another important figure in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The interview reportedly occurred at a Karachi apartment, and within days, Pakistani authorities arrested Binalshibh in a shootout in Karachi. Officials have said they hoped to capture Mohammed in the raid,
Suspect fled Qatar in `96
Mohammed barely escaped from Qatar in 1996 after U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies had received information about his whereabouts, living with a member of the Qatari royal family. During intense discussions between the U.S. and the government in Doha, Mohammed dropped out of sight and fled the country.
Authorities in Pakistan were alerted to the possibility that Mohammed was there last summer, Pakistani officials said. That was when terrorist suspects began to identify him in connection with other acts of violence, such as the January 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter.
Within the last two weeks, a tip from an informant for the Pakistani security service led to a raid in Quetta in hopes of finding Mohammed, Pakistani officials said. But he had disappeared again.
Then early Saturday, Mohammed’s pursuers struck again.
“It’s still a little early to tell what he’s going to say,” said one official. “But he was the guy who gave the `go’ signal, so he could give us an awful lot.”