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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