Читать книгу The World's Ten Most Evil Men - From Twisted Dictators to Child Killers - Nigel Cawthorne - Страница 6

On the morning of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, four US airliners were hijacked. Two of the planes, filled with passengers, were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, starting fires that eventually destroyed the 110-storey buildings. A third was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. On board a fourth plane, believed to be heading for the White House, the passengers fought back against the hijackers. As a result, the aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, some 75 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In all, some 3,000 people lost their lives.

A few hours after the Twin Towers collapsed, the Bush administration concluded that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were to blame, though bin Laden has actually never been formally indicted for the attacks. Soon the British government also came to the decision that bin Laden was to blame. Although bin Laden appears on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, this is for the bombing of the US Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998 when over 200 were killed. The wanted poster does, however, state: ‘In addition, bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world’ and also mentions that he is ‘considered armed and extremely dangerous’. And there is a price on his head: ‘The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden. An additional $2million is being offered through a program developed and funded by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.’

At first, bin Laden denied involvement in the attacks, referring to them through an aide as ‘punishment from Allah’. Later, he took responsibility for ‘inspiring’ the events of September 11 although according to him, the attacks were down to the US for supporting Israel. Then, on video tape aired on the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera on 29 October 2004, bin Laden admitted that al-Qaeda had decided that they ‘should destroy towers in America’ because they were ‘a free people… and we want to regain the freedom of our nation.’

Finally, in another video tape released through Al-Jazeera on 23 May 2006, he admitted: ‘I am the man responsible for the recruitment of the 19 people who carried out the attacks.’ This came two weeks after Zacarias Moussaoui, a would-be hijacker captured during flight-training two weeks before 9/11, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on four counts of conspiracy.

‘Brother Zacarias Moussaoui has no connection whatever with the 11 September operation,’ said bin Laden, adding that Moussaoui’s confession was, ‘null and void, because it was extracted under pressure.’

Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation run and trained by Osama bin Laden, has also been responsible for attacks in the Yemen, Riyadh, Bali, Jakarta, Tunisia, Casablanca and Istanbul, as well as inspiring bombings in Madrid and London. It is linked to other terrorist groups across the Islamic world, and under the inspiration of bin Laden, it has declared a jihad or ‘Holy War’ against the US and the West itself. No one can say how many deaths bin Laden has been responsible for; what we can be sure of is that he has promoted hatred and bloodshed on a global scale and the death toll that can be laid at his door will continue to accumulate with the passing years.

Osama bin Laden was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was one of more than 50 children of one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families. His father, Muhammed Awad bin Laden, was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Originally from Yemeni, Muhammed bin Laden moved to Saudi Arabia as a youth, when he began a construction company. Soon, he became so successful that he could lend money to King Faisal, who issued a royal decree awarding all future construction projects to bin Laden’s company. As a result, the bin Ladens became the richest non-royals in Saudi Arabia with a company grossing US$5 billion a year.

Muhammed bin Laden married 22 times. Born in Riyadh on 10 March 1957, Osama was his sixteenth child and his only son by his tenth wife Hamida, a Syrian thought to be more cosmopolitan that his other Wahhabi wives. Soon after Osama was born, his parents divorced and his mother married Muhammad al-Attas. The couple had four children, and the young Osama lived in the new household with three stepbrothers and one stepsister.

Although he was raised a devout Sunni Muslim, from 1968 to 1976 Osama bin Laden was educated at an élite secular school in Jeddah, where the pupils wore a Western-style school uniform. Reports on his further education are confused: he himself claims to have studied Economics and Business Administration at King Abdul Aziz University. Formal biographies say he earned a degree in Civil Engineering in 1979, or a degree in Public Administration in 1981, but other sources state that, though he was reportedly ‘hard-working’, bin Laden dropped out of university during the third year before sitting his degree. The implication is that his main interest was religion and he spent his time ‘interpreting the Koran and jihad’, as well as doing charitable work. It seems that, along the way, he dropped the liberal Sunni beliefs of his mother and became a hard-line Wahhabi, a puritan sect dominant in Saudi Arabia that stresses a literal belief in the Koran and the establishment of a Muslim state based solely on Islamic Sharia law.

In 1974, at the age of 17, bin Laden married his 14-year-old cousin Najwa Ghanem, a Syrian, in Latakia. She went on to become the mother of some 11 of his children including Saaden bin Laden, a stalwart of al-Qaeda. Saaden is thought to have been responsible for the suicide bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia on 11 April 2002, which killed 19 and wounded 30. He is also thought to have been behind another suicide bombing in Riyadh on 12 May and a further attack in Morocco just four days later. Besides Najwa, Osama bin Laden is reported to have married three other women, as permitted under Muslim law, and he has fathered up to 24 children.

While bin Laden attended university in 1979, several crucial events occurred on the world stage. In February of that year the US-backed Shah of Iran was ousted following an Islamic Revolution under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Meanwhile, the Communist government in Kabul called on the Soviet Union for support in their fight against regional groups, who became known collectively as the mujahideen – which means ‘those who engage in jihad’. By the end of that year, Soviet helicopters, tanks and two motorised rifle divisions were in action in Afghanistan.

After leaving college, bin Laden travelled to Afghanistan to join the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, who was recruiting international volunteers and raising funds for the mujahideen. The Afghan jihad was backed by American money and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. According to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian, bin Laden received security training from the CIA, who also provided money and weapons to the mujahideen. America saw the struggle in Afghanistan as part of the Cold War. US politicians, including National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw no danger in Muslim fundamentalism. Rather, they regarded the fundamentalists as allies in the global struggle against Communism and the Soviet Union.

In 1984, Azzam and bin Laden set up the Maktab al-Khidamat organisation using bin Laden’s family fortune. Also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, it funnelled money, arms and Muslim fighters recruited around the Arabic world into the Afghan war. MAK was run through Peshawar, where it maintained a close liaison with the Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence and the CIA. The organisation also opened recruitment and fundraising centres in Arab and Western countries, including 33 such centres in the US.

By 1988, bin Laden had split from Maktab al-Khidamat. While Azzam continued to provide material support for Afghan fighters, bin Laden sought a more active role. One key dispute was over Azzam’s insistence that Arab fighters recruited from abroad should be integrated into Afghan fighting groups, while bin Laden believed that they should form their own separate fighting force. This was to be the beginnings of al-Qaeda (which means ‘the base’ although the name did not emerge until much later).

Armed with modern weapons supplied by the Americans and with highly motivated fighters, the mujahideen were more than a match for the Red Army. Afghanistan turned into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam and Moscow began to withdraw its troops. The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan in February 1989.

Around that time bin Laden also came under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Although Azzam was a believer in global jihad, he felt that the first priority should be to set up an Islamic government in post-war Afghanistan. Al-Zawahiri, in contrast, favoured using the assets of the MAK to overthrow governments in Muslim countries deemed to be too un-Islamic. In November 1989, Azzam died in a car bombing, for which the EIJ were under suspicion. With the death of Azzam, many MAK members moved over to bin Laden’s new organisation.

That month, al-Qaeda gained another key recruit. Also in November 1989, Ali Mohamed, a former Special Forces sergeant stationed at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, left military service and moved to Santa Clara, California. He travelled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he became involved with bin Laden’s plans. The following year, on 8 November 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey apartment of Mohammed’s associate El Sayyid Nosair and discovered Special Warfare Center manuals, books on bomb-making and evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. Nosair was eventually convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bin Laden contributed $20,000 towards his defence.

Though the Red Army has withdrawn from Afghanistan, the civil war continued, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government in Kabul fell and the mujahideen took over. They were a disparate group, made up of numerous local factions, however, and the result was anarchy. Order was restored when the Taliban, an army of religious students under the ultra-pious former mujahideen fighter Mullah Mohammad Omar, took over in 1994.

Bin Laden had left the country long before. In 1990, he returned to Saudi Arabia, a hero of jihad: it was said that he and his Arab legion had brought down the mighty superpower of the Soviet Union – though, in fact, foreign fighters made only a minor contribution to the struggle. However, after spending his time among fundamentalists who were happy to lay down their lives for Islam, bin Laden rallied against the corruption of the Saudi government and that of his own family.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, posing an immediate threat to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden met the Crown Prince and offered his Arab fighters to King Fahd to defend Saudi Arabia. Instead, King Fahd accepted the support of the US and NATO, meaning foreign, non-Muslim troops would be stationed on Saudi territory. Bin Laden was appalled. Their presence, he argued, defiled the sacred soil of the ‘land of two mosques’, meaning the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. His vocal criticism of the Saudi monarchy provoked government attempts to silence him.

Aided by ex-Green Beret Ali Mohammed, bin Laden moved to Sudan in 1992. This was at the invitation of the Islamic scholar and leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front Hassan al-Turabi, following an Islamist coup d’état. There, bin Laden set up legitimate businesses, including a tannery, two large farms and a road construction company. The Sudanese leaders were delighted that the wealthy Saudi was investing in their fledgling Islamic state, but when Saudi Arabia pressured Pakistan to get rid of the mujahedeen living along the border with Afghanistan, bin Laden reportedly paid for the 480 Afghan veterans to come and work for him. With their assistance, he set up camps to train insurgents, while continuing his verbal assaults on King Fahd. On 5 March 1994, Fahd retaliated by personally revoking his citizenship and sending an emissary to Sudan to seize bin Laden’s passport. Bin Laden’s family also cut off his allowance amounting to around $7million a year.

By then, bin Laden had already begun his global jihad. In 1992 he sent an emissary named Qari el-Said with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists there and to warn them not to compromise with the impious secular government. In the civil war that resulted, an estimated 150,000–200,000 Algerians have died. Civilians have been massacred, and journalists and politicians assassinated.

On 29 December 1992, al-Qaeda set off bombs outside two hotels in Aden, Yemen. The target was American soldiers, on their way to take part in Operation Restore Hope, in support of the United Nation’s famine relief programme in Somalia. In fact, the US soldiers were billeted elsewhere. However, two people were killed – an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker – and seven more, mostly Yemenis, severely injured. This was justified by al-Qaeda theoretician and co-founder Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, aka Abu Hajer al Iraqi, by reference to two medieval fatwas, which ruled that killing innocent bystanders was OK because if they were good Muslims, they would go to paradise… and if they weren’t, it didn’t matter.

As a result of the attack in Yemen, Sudan was placed on the State Department’s list of countries sponsoring terrorist activities. At the time, the US government believed that bin Laden’s followers were trying to obtain the components to build nuclear weapons and, with Sudan’s National Islamic Front, they began to work developing chemical arms.

On 26 February 1993, a car bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,500-lb device was intended to knock Tower One onto Tower Two, bringing both towers down and killing up to 250,000 people. As it was, the towers shook and swayed, but the foundations held. On that occasion only six people were killed and 1,042 injured. The blast caused nearly $300million of damage to property.

The attackers had received funding from al-Qaeda member Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Their leader was Khalid’s nephew Ramzi Yousef. He had been trained in a camp in Afghanistan and has been linked via co-conspirators to El Sayyid Nosair in New Jersey, where the bomb was assembled. In tapped telephone conversations, ‘al-Qaeda’ was mentioned. After the attack on the World Trade Center, it is alleged that Yousef took part in an attempt to assassinate Benazir Bhutto, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, in the summer of 1993. Then, with his uncle Khalid and Afghan-war veteran Wali Khan Amin Shah, Yousef planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II, or perhaps US President Bill Clinton, during a visit to the Philippines, crash a plane into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and blow up 11 airliners on their way from Asia to the United States, killing around 4,000 passengers. Again, the plot was funded by bin Laden.

Yousef began making bombs, which he planned to conceal under the seats of the aircraft. On 1 December 1994, one such bomb was tested by placing it under the seat of the Greenbelt Theater in Manila. It went off, injuring several theatregoers. A second bomb was tested on 11 December when Yousef placed it under the seat of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo, with a stopover in the city of Cebu. He got off at Cebu, his seat taken by 24-year-old Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami. Four hours later, the bomb went off, blowing Haruki in half and injuring ten other passengers. It blew a large hole in the cabin floor and damaged the rudder control. The crew made an emergency landing at Okinawa, saving the lives of the 272 other passengers and 20 crewmembers. By then, Yousef had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. He was arrested in an al-Qaeda safe house is Islamabad and extradited to the US. At his trial, he admitted: ‘Yes, I am a terrorist and am proud of it.’

The judge described him as an ‘apostle of evil’ and sentenced him to life imprisonment without possibility of parole with the recommendation that he should spend his entire sentence in solitary confinement.

Meanwhile, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed remained at large, eventually rejoining bin Laden, when he laid out the first plans for the 9/11 attacks. He also had contact with Richard Reid, the ‘shoe bomber’ who tried to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on 22 December 2001. Reid also seems to have had contact with Zacarias Moussaoui, the one man convicted of 9/11 offences. There were also allegations that Khalid was mixed up in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 and the Bali night-club bombings that same year. In March 2003, Khalid was captured in Rawalpindi. The Human Rights Watch charity maintain he disappeared into a semi-secret prison in Jordan before reappearing in US naval base Guantanamo Bay, where he is said to have admitted, ‘decapitating with my blessed right hand the head of American Jew Daniel Pearl’ as well as planning attacks on London’s Heathrow Airport and Big Ben.

Bin Laden, meanwhile, had established at least three terrorist training camps in north Sudan, where recruits from at least half-a-dozen countries were put through their paces. In October 1993, in nearby Somalia, US special forces attached to the United Nations’ mission there made a bungled attempt to capture the general staff of warlord Mohamad Farah Aidid and found themselves involved the Black Hawk Down incident, otherwise known as the First Battle of Mogadishu. In the largest firefight since Vietnam, 19 American troops died when set upon by local militias trained by bin Laden.

Al-Zawahiri and the EIJ had also joined bin Laden in Sudan in 1992. They served at the core of al-Qaeda but also engaged in separate operations against the Egyptian government. However, in 1993, a young schoolgirl was killed in an unsuccessful EIJ attempt on the life of the Egyptian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi and Egyptian public opinion turned against the Islamist bombers. The police arrested 280 members and six were executed. Undeterred, in 1995, an attempt was made to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity in Ethiopia. The attack was led by Mustafa Hamza, a senior Egyptian member of al-Qaeda. It failed when a grenade launcher malfunctioned and Mubarak’s limousine proved to be bulletproof. Sudanese Intelligence was implicated when it was found that the terrorists’ weapons had been smuggled into the country via the Sudanese Embassy. Then in November 1995, EIJ made a suicide-bomb attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, killing 16, wounding 60 and damaging buildings within a half-mile radius.

By then, according to US Intelligence sources, bin Laden had established extensive training facilities for foreign guerrillas in northern Yemen, near the Saudi border. In August 1995, he wrote an open letter to King Fahd calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks in order to drive US forces out of Saudi Arabia. Then, on 13 November, five Americans and two Indians were killed in the truck bombing of the US-run Saudi National Guard training centre in Riyadh. Bin Laden denied involvement, but praised the attack. However, American and Saudi authorities believe he had a hand in it. Indeed, before four Saudi men accused of bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to make a public confession in which they admitted receiving communiqués from bin Laden.

In May 1996, under increasing pressure from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the US, Sudan asked bin Laden to leave. Soon afterwards, the EIJ were expelled, following the killing of the sons of two senior EIJ members, who had been drugged and blackmailed into working for the Egyptian Intelligence Service. In a kangaroo court, the boys had been found guilty of ‘sodomy, treason and attempted murder’ and sentenced to death under Sharia law. Al-Zawahiri ordered their execution by firing squad and distributed video tapes of it.

Kicked out of Sudan, bin Laden returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where he forged a close relationship with Mullah Mohammad Omar. Though he had had to sell his assets in Sudan at a loss, bin Laden was still able to continue his attacks on Saudi Arabia. On 25 June 1996, members of Hizballah Al-Hijaz – Party of God in the Hijah (the western part of Saudi Arabia) – exploded a truck bomb outside the Khobar Towers compound in Dhahran, which housed foreign military personnel. Nineteen US servicemen and one Saudi were killed and 372 of various nationalities wounded. Bin Laden was seen being congratulated that day and it is thought that he was behind the attack.

On 23 August 1996, bin Laden signed and issued a Declaration of Jihad outlining al-Qaeda’s goals. These were to drive US forces from the Arabian Peninsula, overthrow the Government of Saudi Arabia, liberate Muslim holy sites and support Islamic revolutionary groups around the world. He declared Saudis have the right to strike at US troops in the Persian Gulf. That same month, a secret grand jury investigation of Osama bin Laden began in New York.

In November, bin Laden was interviewed for the British TV programme Dispatches, during which he threatened to wage an Islamic holy war against the United States and its allies, if Washington did not remove its troops from the Gulf region. Then, in May 1997, CNN aired an interview with bin Laden, in which he condemned the US ‘occupation of the land of the holy places.’

In Afghanistan, bin Laden gave financial and paramilitary support to the Taliban regime and it was during 1997 that he moved to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold. Following this, al-Qaeda gained a measure of legitimacy under the Afghan Ministry of Defence. It established training camps in the Afghanistan and Pakistani border region, and raised money from donors who had supported the MAK during the anti-Soviet jihad. Ties with the Pakistani Intelligence Services were renewed.

According to the Swiss Federal Police, bin Laden funded the 17 November 1997 massacre at Luxor, where Islamic terrorists killed 58 foreign tourists – 36 of whom were Swiss – and 4 Egyptians at the famous Luxor Temple. Another 26 were wounded. Later, the terrorists were found dead, having apparently committed suicide. Again, the Egyptian people turned against the Islamists.

In 23 February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a fatwa in the name of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a name al-Qaeda sometimes goes under. It said: ‘To kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together”, and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah”.’

He also issued a joint declaration with the Islamic Group, the EIJ, the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh and the ‘Jamaat ul Ulema e Pakistan’ under the banner of the ‘World Islamic Front’, again stating that Muslims should kill Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world.

In May 1998, bin Laden was interviewed by ABC reporter John Miller. He defended the killing of women and children on the grounds of ‘reciprocity’. After all, he pointed out, America had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that did not differentiate between men and women, or adults and children. He defended Ramzi Yousef, saying: ‘He is a Muslim who wanted to protect his religion jealously from the oppression practised by America against Islam.’ And that: ‘He acted with zeal to make the Americans understand that their government was attacking Muslims in order to safeguard the American-Jewish interests.’

Bin Laden also praised Wali Khan Amin Shah, the man who had actually placed the bomb under the seat in the Greenbelt Theater in Manila. He had known him in Afghanistan and endorsed his plan to assassinate President Clinton. Asked whether he had ordered and funded the attacks on the US military in Dhahran and Riyadh, bin Laden boasted that he had inspired them and called their perpetrators ‘holy martyrs’. His aim, he said, was to fight until the Americans were driven out of all the Islamic countries. After all, Allah had defeated the Soviet Union, which had since fallen apart. The same future awaited America.

‘Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America,’ bin Laden boasted. And he had other bleak prophecies: ‘We are certain that we shall – with the grace of Allah – prevail over the Americans and over the Jews, as the Messenger of Allah promised us in an authentic prophetic tradition when He said the Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews and before Jews hide behind trees and behind rocks.’

The Saudi Royal Family would go the way of the Shah of Iran, he continued. They had ‘sided with the Jews and the Christians giving them free reign over the land of the two Holy Mosques. These are grave offences that are grounds for expulsion from the faith. They shall all be wiped out.’

Bin Laden crowed about the victory of his men over the Americans in Somalia: the superpowers were no longer invincible and the US soldiers merely ‘paper tigers’. According to him, all America had done during the First Gulf War in Iraq, he said, was to have destroyed the milk and dairy industry that was vital for infants and children, and blow up the dams necessary for the crops that people grew to feed their families.

‘Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order,’ he said. ‘After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realised that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim.’

Asked whether he had a message for the American people, he told ABC’s John Miller: ‘We believe that this [the Clinton] administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the State Department, the Department of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them. They make use of America to further their plans for the world, especially the Islamic world… While millions of Americans are homeless and destitute and live in abject poverty, their government is busy occupying our land and building new settlements, and helping Israel build new settlements in the point of departure for our Prophet’s midnight journey to the seven heavens.’

Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven from the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The following month there was a raid on a cell of an Islamic terrorist movement in Albania and two suspected employees of bin Laden were arrested. Two weeks later, two more suspected associates of bin Laden were arrested in another raid. Egyptian nationals, they were turned over to anti-terrorist officials in Egypt. All four were associated with the Islamic Revival Foundation.

On 8 June 1998, the grand jury investigation of bin Laden begun in 1996 issued a sealed indictment, charging him with the killing of five Americans and two Indians in the 1995 truck bombing of the Saudi National Guard training centre in Riyadh and, ‘conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States’. Prosecutors said that bin Laden headed a terrorist organisation called al-Qaeda and was a major financier of Islamic terrorists around the world.

On 6 August, the EIJ sent the United States a warning: they would soon deliver a message to Americans, ‘which we hope they read with care, because we will write it, with God’s help, in a language they will understand.’ The following day, their meaning became clear.

On 7 August 1998, car bombs went off simultaneously outside the US Embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. In Dar es Salaam, the attack killed at least 11 and injured 85; in Nairobi, some 212 people were killed and an estimated 4,000 injured. Although the targets were US government facilities, most of the victims were African civilians. The 11 killed in Dar es Salaam were Tanzanians, while about 200 of those killed at the embassy in Nairobi were Kenyans.

According to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), which plots the rise of al-Qaeda, the Dar es Salaam bombing was called Operation al-Aqsa, while the Nairobi operation was named after the Holy Kaaba in Mecca, though he points out that neither had an obvious connection with the American Embassies in Africa.

Bin Laden initially claimed that these two embassies had been targeted because of the US ‘invasion’ of Somalia; also that an American plan to partition Sudan had been hatched in the Embassy in Nairobi, while the genocide in Rwanda had also been cooked up inside the two American Embassies. However, Lawrence Wright concludes that none of these claims made sense. Bin Laden’s actual goal was, he says, ‘to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called “The Graveyard of Empires”’.

In response, President Clinton froze on assets that could be linked to bin Laden. Cruise missiles were launched that hit a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, that US Intelligence mistakenly believed was making chemical weapons, and al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, where 19 were killed, though bin Laden himself escaped unharmed.

President Clinton went on television to announce the attacks, saying the camp at Khost, where al-Qaeda leaders were thought to have been meeting, was ‘one of the most active terrorist bases in the world.’ He added: ‘I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam,’ which he called, ‘a great religion.’

However, many, including bin Laden himself, saw the attack as Clinton’s way of deflecting attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was then reaching its climax. The Sudan government condemned the attack, dismissing Clinton as a ‘proven liar’ with ‘a hundred girlfriends’. Around the world, there were massive protests against the attacks, mostly in Muslim countries. On 26 August 1998, a Muslim organisation bombed a Planet Hollywood restaurant in Cape Town, killing two and injuring 26. In Afghanistan, the Taliban also denounced the bombing. Bin Laden pledged to attack the US again, while a court under the control of the Taliban declared him ‘a man without sin’. Meanwhile, back in Britain the Sunday Times reported that bin Laden was sending Islamic mercenaries into Kashmir to support an Islamic secession campaign there.

On 4 November 1998, Osama bin Laden was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on charges of the murder of US nationals outside the United States, conspiracy to murder US nationals outside the United States and attacks on a Federal facility resulting in death for the embassy bombings. Evidence against him included courtroom testimony by former al-Qaeda members and satellite phone records. A reward of $5million was placed on his head. The US Attorney’s office filed an indictment covering the killing of members of the American military stationed in Saudi Arabia and Somalia, as well as the murder of US embassy employees in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in January. Then, on 7 June 1999, bin Laden made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Requests for his extradition from Afghanistan fell on deaf ears, so President Clinton went to the United Nations and persuaded them to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite him.

Everything went quiet until the morning of 11 September 2001 when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. Each team of four hijackers included one member who had undergone some pilot training. They intentionally crashed two of the airliners full of passengers into the World Trade Center in New York City. One plane hit each tower, with extensive loss of life. Both buildings collapsed soon afterwards, causing extensive damage to the surrounding area.

The hijackers crashed a third passenger-laden airliner into the Pentagon. Passengers on board the fourth learnt from their mobile phones that other hijacked planes had hit the World Trade Center. Fearing the same fate, they rushed the hijackers in an attempt to seize control of the plane. In the resulting mêlée, the plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Although all those on board lost their lives, their heroic resistance at least prevented further loss of life on the ground.

Apart from the nine hijackers, 2,973 people died as an immediate result of the attacks, and a medical examiner has found that at least one person has since died of lung disease due to the resulting dust from the World Trade Center. Another 24 people remain missing and are presumed dead, bringing the total number of victims to 2,998.

All 246 on board the four hijacked planes died – no one survived. In New York, 2,603 died in the Twin Towers and on the ground. All were civilian. At the Pentagon, 125 died, some of whom were military personnel, including Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, the highest ranking military officer on 9/11.

In the North Tower 1,366 people, at or above the impact, died. Hundreds were instantly killed; the rest were trapped and died when the Tower collapsed. In the South Tower, up to 600 were instantly killed or trapped above the impact. Only about 18 managed to escape from above the place where the plane hit before the Tower collapsed. At least 200 jumped to their deaths from the burning towers, dying when they hit streets and rooftops hundreds of feet below. Some of those above impact made their way upwards towards the roof in the hope of being saved by helicopter rescue, but the doors that gave access to the roof were locked. Besides, the intense heat and thick smoke would have prevented rescue helicopters from landing.

Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., an investment bank on the 101st–105th floors of the North Tower, lost 658 employees, many more than any other firm. Marsh Inc., immediately below them on the 93rd–100th floors where the plane hit, lost 295. The Aon Corporation (floors 92 and 98–105 of the South Tower) lost 175; the New York City Fire Department lost 341 fire fighters and two paramedics. New York City Police Department lost 23 staff. Thirty-seven Port Authority Police Department officers and eight private ambulance personnel were killed. The head of security at the World Trade Center, John P. O’Neill – a former assistant director of the FBI, who assisted in the capture of Ramzi Yousef – was also killed while trying to rescue people from the South Tower.

The dead included eight children: five on the plane that hit the Pentagon, three on the plane hitting the South Tower. The youngest was two years old, while the oldest passenger on board the hijacked planes was 82. In the buildings themselves, the youngest victim was 17 and the oldest was 79. Many had no resting place. New York medical examiners failed to identify the remains of more than 1,100 victims and the city has about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead. Bone fragments were still being found in 2006, when workers demolished the damaged Deutsche Bank Building nearby.

Bin Laden initially denied involvement. On 16 September 2001, he read out a statement that was later broadcast by Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite channel: ‘I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation.’ However, he was delighted that, ‘God has struck America at its Achilles heel and destroyed its greatest buildings, praise and blessing to Him.’ And he dismissed the allegations being levelled at him as another example of America’s hatred for Islam.

However, it was plain that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack, as he admitted later. The US demanded his extradition once again, and when the Taliban again refused to give him up, America and Britain invaded Afghanistan. By November 2001, US forces had reached Jalalabad where they discovered a video tape left by al-Qaeda members. During the course of the tape, bin Laden discusses the attack in a way that indicates he knew precisely what would happen:

We had notification since the previous Thursday [6 September] that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5.30pm our time… Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center… After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.

He also knew in advance of the second plane:

They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: ‘be patient.’ The difference between the first and the second plane hitting the towers was twenty minutes. And the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon was one hour.

The conversation also reveals that bin Laden had more detailed knowledge of what would occur. He mentions that the Egyptian Muhammad Atta was the leader of the operation. Also, those who had not been trained to fly did not know the details of the plot and only learned of it just before they boarded the plane.

We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all… Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.

Reacting to the tape, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, ‘[Osama bin Laden] seems delighted at having killed more people than he anticipated, which leaves you wondering just how deep his evil heart and soul really is.’

It was only in the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election that bin Laden finally abandoned his denials and admitted al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. In a further tape in 2006, he boasted of being personally responsible.

Despite numerous attempts to capture him, bin Laden remains at large. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda goes from strength to strength. In April 2002, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the EIJ merged with bin Laden’s group. Their tentacles spread worldwide. In October 2002, suicide bombers blew up a nightclub called Paddy’s Pub in Bali and then, seconds later, detonated a huge car bomb in the street outside, killing 88 Australians, 38 Indonesians and 24 Brits. Hundreds more suffered horrific injuries and burns. Most were holidaymakers in their twenties and early thirties.

On 15 November 2003, truck bombs went off outside two synagogues in Istanbul, killing 27 people, largely Turkish Muslims, and injuring over 300 more. Six Jews were also killed in the attack. Five days later suicide bombers exploded other vehicles outside the British consulate and HSBC bank, killing 30 and wounding another 400, again largely Turkish Muslims. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for both attacks.

On 11 March 2004, bombs planted on commuter trains in Madrid by al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists, killed 191 and wounded 1,755. Four suicide bombers, who also drew inspiration from al-Qaeda, set off bombs in London, killing 52 and injuring 700 on 7 July 2005. On 27 July 2005, the day of the memorial service for the dead, a second group of would-be suicide bombers staged another attack. Although the intention was to cause a large-scale loss of life, this time only the detonators went off, causing one minor injury. The perpetrators were arrested and later found guilty of conspiracy to murder. Al-Qaeda is also thought to be behind the plot to detonate liquid explosives on a number of planes travelling from Heathrow airport to the United States in August 2006. No link has been discovered between al-Qaeda and the attack on Glasgow airport in June 2007, however.

Al-Qaeda has also made attacks in Iraq after the US and Britain invaded in 2003, but has since been driven out by local insurgents. Terrorists with links to al-Qaeda have also been active in Algeria, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Palestine and the Lebanon. On 13 July 2007, the figure set on bin Laden’s head by the US government was doubled to $50million.

Although Osama bin Laden claims to be fighting in the name of Islam he has done little to help his fellow Muslims. Indeed, he seems happy to kill them – many even died in the Twin Towers. As a result of his actions, Muslims who live in Western countries have been alienated from the mainstream of society. In a number of Muslim countries, he has stirred up factional fighting with inevitable casualties. In addition, he has done nothing to help the Palestinians, whose cause he claims to support. Little of his effort has been directed at Saudi Arabia, whose rulers he says should be expelled from the faith. His endeavours there have been largely counterproductive, leaving the monarchy as secure as ever.

Bin Laden can be counted among the most evil men alive today because, at bottom, he is simply a rich boy merely indulging his millennial fantasy at the expense of other people’s lives, including those of his followers. He has hijacked a religion to unleash a global jihad that has caused untold misery for both victims and perpetrators. In his eyes, innocent civilians can be blown apart in the name of Allah, while the lives of his young followers may be squandered in suicide attacks that seldom have any clear aim.

As New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani stated after two planes laden with passengers crashed into busy office buildings of no military significance on bin Laden’s orders, killing thousands: ‘This man is the personification of evil.’