SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 22 2001
The hunt
Terrorists’ trade in stolen identities
BY DANIEL MCGRORY
HAD FBI agents bothered to ask college lecturers in South Wales about the
terrorist bomber they supposedly taught over a decade ago, then security
chiefs would have realised how Osama bin Laden had carefully created a
generation of impostors. His agents stole the identities and life histories
of at least a dozen Western-educated young men who were all murdered in 1990,
according to a former head of the CIA. Every document and record of those
men’s lives were either stolen or doctored to allow bin Laden’s terrorists —
or possibly Saddam Hussein’s — to move freely around the world using a false
identity, says James Woolsey, writing in New Republic magazine. Families of
all 12 men were also killed and all their paperwork erased so nobody would
stumble on bin Laden’s lethal impostors. Only now are security services
realising the extent of his trickery. What nobody knows for sure is how many
“jackals” bin Laden has at his disposal. The man serving life in Colorado,
in America’s most secure prison, for bombing the World Trade Centre in 1993
is not who he says he is. Ramzi Yousef, who aimed to demolish the centre by
toppling one tower into the other, told his interrogators how he was first
recruited to the Islamic cause while he was a student in Swansea. He
described how while taking a Higher National Diploma in computer-aided
electrical engineering at West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education in
1987 he gave up drinking in the student bars after being approached by local
followers of the Muslim Brotherhood. The FBI did not think it strange that
Swansea should be a major recruiting station for Islamic militants. Nor did
it think it curious that a young man who had taken an advanced language
course at Oxford and lived in Britain for four years spoke appalling English.
Yousef went on to describe how during his summer holidays in 1988 he went to
Afghanistan for military training to play his part in the holy war there
against the Soviet invaders. After his stint on the front line, where he
learnt to handle explosives, Yousef returned to his studies. It was only
then, he confessed, that the university authorities knew him as Abdul Kareem,
a Pakistani whose wealthy family lived in Kuwait. What has now emerged is
that this master bomber has successfully used nine aliases, among them the
innocent computer student from Swansea and another murder victim. Until two
months ago the US security agencies had never asked anyone at the college to
verify Ramzi Yousef’s confession of his days in Wales. Why they suddenly
re-opened the files on him only seven weeks before the suicide attacks in
America is not clear. Professor Ken Reid, the deputy principal of the
institute, knew the real Abdul Kareem and from even a cursory glance at the
photograph of the convicted World Trade bomber he realised these were two
different men. There was four inches’ difference in height and more than 40lb
in weight, and the impostor looked a lot older than Kareem, who was 27 when
he left university. One had a deformed eye, smaller ears and mouth. A former
CIA officer said it was also apparent that the impostor was not as proficent
on a computer as the gifted young student whose identity he had assumed.
Their accents were different, and while the real Abdul Kareem was known at
university for being shy and respectful to women, voice-mail messages taken
from the impostor used foul language and graphic sexual imagery. The real
Abdul Kareem was murdered in Kuwait shortly after the Iraqi invasion in 1990.
He had gone back to Kuwait City to be with his family but in the confusion at
that time nobody paid much attention to his murder or of 11 other men of
roughly the same age. Their homes were not looted, but carefully ransacked to
eliminate any personal trace that they had been there. Passports vanished,
along with driving licences and bank books. Nobody thought it suspicious at
the time that there were no photographs left of the victims nor books with
their names inscribed on the cover. Security chiefs now fear they were erased
so somebody else could take their place. When Yousef came to assume the
Swansea student’s identity the files in Kuwait had already been tampered
with. Photocopied pages of earlier passports the genuine Kareem had applied
for were among the few records not destroyed during Saddam Hussein’s
invasion. Fingerprints on official records held in Kuwait city were also
doctored to match Ramzi Yousef’s. Another man whose name he used was Abdul
Basit, whose documents were skillfully altered to allow Yousef to adopt his
identity. Mr Woolsey says that federal prosecutors were dangerously wrong to
believe Yousef was just another Muslim who was seduced by the radical cause
while at a British university. Mr Woolsey writes in the New Republic that one
way to prove the confusion over identities is to examine the fingerprints
taken from the genuine students, some of which are believed to be held by
Scotland Yard. But what it will not do is answer the question of who Ramzi
Yousef really is. Mr Woolsey questions whether Saddam Hussein had a part to
play in this conspiracy over fake identities, as the murders of the innocents
happened during his occupation of Kuwait. At the time of the 1993 attack on
the World Trade Centre, he says, it was easier to blame Osama bin Laden
rather than examine who else was involved. What documentary evidence the
security agencies found supported Yousef’s story that he had lived in Wales.
Security agencies now face a monumental task in unravelling all the
identities of the hijackers and suspects to discover how many are false
jackals. The fear is that most of the 19 suicide bombers were using fake
identities.
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