LONDON, Jan 17: A London daily claimed on Thursday that the British shoe-bomber Richard Reid was a key member of the Al Qaeda network whose job was to travel the world on the lookout for potential terror targets, before the Sept 11 attacks.

The Guardian, quoting a US intelligence source reported, that computer files acquired after the fall of Kabul gave details of an Al-Qaeda operative known as Abdul Ra’uff who travelled from Europe to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan — an itinerary strikingly similar to Reid in the run-up to Dec 22.

A US intelligence source confirmed to the Guardian that Reid was Ra’uff and that he had been identified by Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, the Al-Qaeda fighter who ran the group’s Khalden training camp in Afghanistan, where Reid was instructed in the use of explosives.

“The report on Ra’uff’s trip shows how Al-Qaeda members tried to disguise their fundamentalist beliefs and blend in with the environment. At the hotel he would take empty alcohol bottles from the street and put them into trash containers in his room,” the report says.

The paper says that in Amsterdam, he told an airline security agent he had come for hashish. The report details how the man was worried about the Pakistani visa on his British passport and so put it in the washing machine. “He went to the consulate and met an employee who asked what happened to the passport.

“He said, ‘I was drunk and washed my passport,’” says the report, later noting that “washing the passport is a practical way of ridding the passport of any Pakistani visa”.

No direct connection to the Sept 11 attacks could be found but the report recommended that terrorists dress smartly and sit in first or business class “to be near the pilot’s cabin without arousing suspicion”.