The man described as a possible relative, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, 37, a Kuwaiti, is now believed to have been a leading figure in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, who helped plan the Sept 11 attacks, the New York Times said quoting US officials.
The officials also said that Khalid Mohammed is believed to be in Pakistan.
The assessment that Khalid Mohammed played a significant role in the attacks provides a new and direct link between the hijackings last year and the failed airline plot by Youssef’s group in 1995. The estimate also suggests a connection between the first attack on the World Trade Center and its destruction.
Khalid Mohammed has been indicted in the United States on charges that he was involved in the January 1995 plot, led by Youssef, to bomb planes flying between Southeast Asia and the United States.
The FBI has placed him on its list of most wanted terrorists.
American officials told the paper that they had identified Khalid Mohammed as an operative of Al Qaeda before Sept 11 and had begun to suspect soon after the attacks that he had some role in the hijackings. But later, a detailed financial investigation of the money trail from the plot led officials to believe that he had a more prominent role than previously suspected.
In December, the United States increased the reward for his capture, to 25 million dollars.
More recently, intelligence officials said, Abu Zubaydah, Osama’s top lieutenant now in American custody, had helped confirm that Mohammed Khalid had been a pivotal figure in planning the Sept 11 attacks, the paper said.
Since Sept 11, many American experts have pointed out the parallells between the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, and the “Manila plot,” Youssef’s plan to bomb up to 12 planes.
An alternative plot considered by Youssef’s group in 1995 was to hijack the planes, instead of bombing them, and crash them into prominent American buildings, including the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va.
Officials told the Times that the plan to bomb the airliners called for five terrorists to smuggle explosives aboard a succession of American passenger planes flying from cities around East Asia. The terrorists would leave the planes at the first stop, leaving bombs timed to explode in midair as the airliners flew on to other Asian cities. The plan was to blow up as many as 12 jets within a few days in January 1995, potentially killing thousands of people.
After Youssef’s conviction in federal district court in Manhattan in 1996, the State Department issued an advisory warning that “the potential exists for retaliation by Youssef’s sympathizers against American interests.”
Federal prosecutors have previously identified Khalid Mohammed as someone who helped Youssef finance and develop the Manila plot. By 1998, they had announced a two million dollars reward for his capture.
Officials did not say how close a relative they believe Khalid Mohammed is to Youssef, who is in the federal penitentiary in Florence.
The paper said for many years, however, the CIA and the FBI were not certain that there was a direct connection between Youssef and Al Qaeda. Although they had a shared radical ideology and used similar terrorist tactics, the trade center bombing in 1993 occurred before American investigators began to see signs that Al Qaeda was emerging as a major threat.
The United States intelligence officials told the paper that Khalid Mohammed seemed to have been a crucial operational planner for Sept 11, perhaps just below Osama bin Laden.