Mohamed Atta, a student of urban planning, militant Muslim and suicidal pilot, was a leader of his hijacking cell and shuttled among cities in the U.S. and abroad, offering investigators a trail that could lead to key managers of the conspiracy to attack America.
According to records reviewed on Saturday, he travelled to the U.S. from countries including Germany and Spain, which have many active terrorist cells. In the months before the assault on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, he reportedly made two trips from Miami to Spain.
Atta's journeys fit a pattern taught by trainers for Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive who runs a terrorist network from Afghanistan. The trainers teach followers to communicate instructions in person and to avoid telephones or any other means subject to electronic surveillance. Tracing Atta's journeys may lead investigators to middle-level handlers directing what U.S. officials describe as isolated cells of terrorists who have infiltrated the U.S. They commandeered airliners on Tuesday and piloted them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the worst terrorist attack in American history.
U.S. secretary of state Colin L. Powell has said Osama bin Laden is the prime suspect. U.S. and foreign counter-terrorism specialists evaluating last week's events point to disturbing developments in the bin Laden organisation: The complexity of its cellular structure has increased. The significance of its targets has grown. Perhaps most disturbing, the sophistication of its technology has escalated year by year. These experts fear that the logical next step might be chemical, biological or nuclear terrorism.
Intelligence sources revealed that the U.S. reconnaissance satellites had recently spotted numerous dead animals in fields near a bin Laden camp, suggesting that the testing of chemical weapons might be underway. Atta, 33, reportedly co-founded an Islamic prayer group at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany, and shared an apartment there with many others, all linked to the bin Laden network. He is said to have written a theses on the restoration of the old quarter of the city of Aleppo, which took him to Syria, long regarded by the U.S. as a promoter of international terrorism.
American officials said the bin Laden adherents who bombed the USS Cole last year had received material support from Iran through Syria. Atta, older and better educated than other members of his cell, was responsible for paying the rent of the Hamburg apartment and used his credit card to lease cars for himself and at least one other hijacker in his cell. He obtained a visa at the U.S. consulate in Berlin on May 18, 2000, and came to Newark, N. J., on June 3 on a flight from Prague, Czech Republic.
Atta's conduct reflects the training terrorist Ahmed Ressam had described when he recently testified as a government witness after being sentenced to more than 140 years in prison for attempting to bomb Los Angeles international airport. Experts say that Al Qeada, bin Laden's organisation, is so complex that it is at once, global, multinational and decentralised. “We've never seen a network like that before. It's essentially a flat network. All those we have fought before have been hierarchical and vertical. But horizontal networks have a very high capacity for regeneration and for linking up with other organisations,” an expert said.
“The most difficult thing (for law
enforcement) is to infiltrate networks composed of very few people who
are very mobile. It's even more difficult to look at groups of three or
four, when they cross the border from Belgium, Germany or Sweden,” he said.
(LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST)