Author:
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 17, 2001
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)
