Al-Qaeda’s deadliest face was everywhere but in the dark

But Mohammed had been under 24-hour surveillance for several days and four agents of Pakistan’s ISI were sitting elsewhere on the plane. Five times between Sept 10, 2002, and Feb 13, Pakistani authorities, working with the CIA and the FBI, had come within a hair of Mohammed.

For years, Mohammed was a glimmer — one name among many who flitted in the shadows as Al-Qaeda grew more and more lethal. But when he was finally captured on March 1 in Rawalpindi, roused from bed at 3 a.m. with a hint of contempt still on his lips despite his dishevelled appearance, Mohammed had become a quarry of inestimable importance.

Mohammed resided at the centre of the Al-Qaeda web. From his longtime base in Karachi, he made real the violent visions of a terrorist leadership that lay across the border in Afghanistan. The carnage visited on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was directed by his then-invisible hand.

After Al-Qaeda’s leadership was killed or dispersed, Mohammed, although on the run, became the repository for the group’s hopes for renewal and revenge.

Investigators have tied him to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the bombing that killed more than 180 people in Bali, the fire-bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia and multiple failed conspiracies, including a dirty-bomb attack on an American city and the bombing of US embassies in Southeast Asia.

He was also exploiting old links with Pakistani extremist groups, which predate his late entry into al-Qaida in 1997, to spawn attacks on westerners in Karachi, according to US and Pakistani investigators.

Mohammed’s arrest could break the back of Al-Qaeda. The known shards of his life never quite seemed to fit together. In North Carolina, where he attended college, he was reluctant to shake the hand of a woman.

In the Philippines, while planning to kill the Pope and blow American planes out of the sky, he was a bon vivant who liked to wear tuxedos and flatter the ladies; he once rented a helicopter to impress a woman. Charming and funny among friends, he was elsewhere cold-blooded to the point of wielding the blade himself when Pearl was murdered, according to investigators.

The son of a mosque leader, Mohammed was born to expatriate Pakistani parents in 1965 in Fahaheel, a beachfront enclave south of Kuwait City where many immigrants settled, hoping to share in the oil boom.

By some accounts, his father, Sheik Mohammed Ali, first worked as a trader, as did many fellow immigrants from Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. By the time Khalid was born, the youngest of four sons and one daughter, his father was a respected elder preacher in a ramshackle neighbourhood of single-storey dwellings.

The mystique that now surrounds Mohammed overshadows Yousef, a smart and capable terrorist and Mohammed’s superior in 1995. Investigators admired the sophistication of Yousef’s bomb-making; he was involved in the 1995 conspiracy in the Philippines to kill Pope John Paul II.

The plot was foiled when the apartment in which the conspirators lived caught fire. But the principals slipped away, and Mohammed, who called himself Abdul Majid or Abu Salem or Salem Ali in Manila, was barely noticed. When Yousef was arrested at a guesthouse in Islamabad in February 1995, Mohammed was in the room next door, unnoticed, Pakistani officials said. Yousef is now serving a life sentence in the US.

After Yousef’s capture in Islamabad, Mohammed fled to Qatar in 1996. When the CIA reported that it did not have the necessary officers or agents in Qatar, a Pentagon plan involving US Special Forces was considered. Because the Pentagon plan involved sending a small attack force by helicopter from Bahrain into Qatar, administration officials feared the Qataris might mistake the US operation for a Bahraini attack.

As a result, the administration asked Qatar’s foreign minister to have Mohammed turned over to the US. According to former officials of the US and Qatari governments, the foreign minister informed Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalida Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family and an Islamic fundamentalist. Thani, sources said, tipped off Mohammed and his group and helped them flee.

In 1997, Mohammed swore allegiance to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, according to US investigators. He already had ties to the group. An organization run by bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was one of the primary funding mechanisms for the 1995 plot to kill the Pope. Mohammed’s fluency in Arabic, English and Urdu, as well as his technical education, made him a major asset. Although he had been indicted in the US in 1996 for the Manila plot, and despite the attempt to nab him in Qatar, he remained a little-known figure to US authorities.

‘‘To be honest, it wasn’t until recently that any of us even realized he was part of Al-Qaeda,’’ a US intelligence official said in an interview last year.

The US was Mohammed’s primary focus. In an interview with Al Jazeera, broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, Mohammed said planning for them began in 1999. ‘‘The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc, and to be a big slap for America on American soil,’’ Mohammed told the network.

For over two years, mostly from Karachi, he orchestrated the attacks. With plans and operatives in place, Mohammed, in the weeks before Sept 11, had moved on, planning new atrocities worldwide.

Mohammed was nearly captured on Sept 10, 2002, when Ramzi Binalshibh, a key member of the Hamburg cell, was picked up, and again the next day when two of Mohammed’s young sons were arrested at an apartment following a shoot-out. Four months later, US and Pakistani officials received information that Mohammed and other Al-Qaeda suspects were hiding at a house owned by a senior leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, on the outskirts of Karachi.

When they raided the house on Jan 10 this year, they captured two Al-Qaeda suspects but Mohammed didn’t show up for a scheduled visit. Ten days later, Pakistani and US intelligence agents raided an apartment near Karachi’s main shopping district and arrested two Jordanian citizens who had been in contact with Mohammed.

Mohammed narrowly escaped arrest one last time, Feb 13 in Quetta. A raid netted the son of Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric. Although they missed Mohammed, US communications specialists soon traced him to another part of the city. It was the endgame. (LA Times-Washington Post)