Washington, April 26: Osama bin Laden was so strapped for cash in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, the millionaire global terror commander was forced to borrow $US7000 to flee Afghanistan ahead of invading US forces.
A new cache of secret US military documents shows key members of the al-Qa’ida command — including 2002 Bali bombing mastermind Hambali (Riduan Ismuddin) and 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — were in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi when the attacks took place.
The claims will add pressure to the US-Pakistan alliance, which has deteriorated over public anger at US missile strikes targeting militants in Pakistan tribal areas and US suspicions that Islamabad’s intelligence agencies continue to covertly back the Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.
The latest Wikileaks release, including information obtained from 14 key Guantanamo Bay detainees using harsh interrogation techniques, reveals a picture of a terror command after 9/11 plagued by internal power disputes and struggling to maintain discipline among bored fighters.
Bin Laden fled his hideout in the Tora Bora mountain range in Afghanistan in mid-December 2001 for Pakistan, just days before US-led coalition troops arrived.
The documents show that on September 11, 2001, Mohammed watched events in New York and Washington on television from a safe house in Karachi with other al-Qa’ida members. Hambali, who was renting a flat in Karachi at the time, was allegedly buying lab equipment for a planned biological weapons program on the day of the attacks.
Just over a year later Mohammed would give him a $US100,000 reward for the Bali attacks, in which 88 Australians were killed.
A third al-Qa’ida commander, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused mastermind of the 2000 attack on the US destroyer Cole off the coast of Yemen, was in hospital recovering from a tonsillectomy.
Mohammed and Nashiri would later fall out over Nashiri’s unilateral approval of a foiled plot by two Saudi nationals to attack the British military base in Gibraltar.
Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed — back in Karachi — was forced to use money pouring into the organisation to assemble a “training program for assassinations and kidnappings as well as pistol and computer training” to occupy bored fighters.
Nashiri, who last week became the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be charged by the Obama administration, was said to be so committed to the cause he had himself injected with impotence drugs in order to focus on jihad.
The last reported sighting of bin Laden was in spring 2003 when several Guantanamo detainees claimed he met other terrorist commanders in Pakistan.
But the documents fail to shed light on where the al-Qa’ida commander in chief was on the day his organisation struck at New York’s twin towers, triggering a war on terror that shows no signs of abating.
Nor do they clarify persistent rumours of his death in the wake of the attacks.
Four days after September 11, bin Laden visited a guesthouse in the Taliban’s southern Afghanistan heartland of Kandahar, where he told a group of Arab fighters to defend Afghanistan “against the infidel invaders”.
The decade-long search for bin Laden has unearthed few credible leads to the location of the Saudi-born terror commander, although rumours have him living in Pakistan under the patronage of the country’s ISI spy agency.
But in the three months between September 11 and his escape from the Tora Bora caves in eastern Afghanistan, bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri drove across Afghanistan, handing out assignments, meeting Taliban leaders and delegating control of al-Qa’ida to the group’s Shura Council in the Pakistan city of Quetta.
–Agencies