Times, UK

The hunt

Terrorists’ trade in stolen identities

BY DANIEL MCGRORY

HAD FBI agents bothered to ask college lecturers in South Wales about the terrorist bomber they supposedly taught over a decade ago, then security chiefs would have realised how Osama bin Laden had carefully created a generation of impostors.

His agents stole the identities and life histories of at least a dozen Western-educated young men who were all murdered in 1990, according to a former head of the CIA.

Every document and record of those men’s lives were either stolen or doctored to allow bin Laden’s terrorists — or possibly Saddam Hussein’s — to move freely around the world using a false identity, says James Woolsey, writing in New Republic magazine. Families of all 12 men were also killed and all their paperwork erased so nobody would stumble on bin Laden’s lethal impostors.

Only now are security services realising the extent of his trickery. What nobody knows for sure is how many “jackals” bin Laden has at his disposal.

The man serving life in Colorado, in America’s most secure prison, for bombing the World Trade Centre in 1993 is not who he says he is.

Ramzi Yousef, who aimed to demolish the centre by toppling one tower into the other, told his interrogators how he was first recruited to the Islamic cause while he was a student in Swansea. He described how while taking a Higher National Diploma in computer-aided electrical engineering at West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education in 1987 he gave up drinking in the student bars after being approached by local followers of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The FBI did not think it strange that Swansea should be a major recruiting station for Islamic militants. Nor did it think it curious that a young man who had taken an advanced language course at Oxford and lived in Britain for four years spoke appalling English.

Yousef went on to describe how during his summer holidays in 1988 he went to Afghanistan for military training to play his part in the holy war there against the Soviet invaders. After his stint on the front line, where he learnt to handle explosives, Yousef returned to his studies.

It was only then, he confessed, that the university authorities knew him as Abdul Kareem, a Pakistani whose wealthy family lived in Kuwait. What has now emerged is that this master bomber has successfully used nine aliases, among them the innocent computer student from Swansea and another murder victim.

Until two months ago the US security agencies had never asked anyone at the college to verify Ramzi Yousef’s confession of his days in Wales. Why they suddenly re-opened the files on him only seven weeks before the suicide attacks in America is not clear.

Professor Ken Reid, the deputy principal of the institute, knew the real Abdul Kareem and from even a cursory glance at the photograph of the convicted World Trade bomber he realised these were two different men.

There was four inches’ difference in height and more than 40lb in weight, and the impostor looked a lot older than Kareem, who was 27 when he left university. One had a deformed eye, smaller ears and mouth. A former CIA officer said it was also apparent that the impostor was not as proficent on a computer as the gifted young student whose identity he had assumed.

Their accents were different, and while the real Abdul Kareem was known at university for being shy and respectful to women, voice-mail messages taken from the impostor used foul language and graphic sexual imagery.

The real Abdul Kareem was murdered in Kuwait shortly after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. He had gone back to Kuwait City to be with his family but in the confusion at that time nobody paid much attention to his murder or of 11 other men of roughly the same age.

Their homes were not looted, but carefully ransacked to eliminate any personal trace that they had been there.

Passports vanished, along with driving licences and bank books. Nobody thought it suspicious at the time that there were no photographs left of the victims nor books with their names inscribed on the cover. Security chiefs now fear they were erased so somebody else could take their place.

When Yousef came to assume the Swansea student’s identity the files in Kuwait had already been tampered with. Photocopied pages of earlier passports the genuine Kareem had applied for were among the few records not destroyed during Saddam Hussein’s invasion. Fingerprints on official records held in Kuwait city were also doctored to match Ramzi Yousef’s. Another man whose name he used was Abdul Basit, whose documents were skillfully altered to allow Yousef to adopt his identity.

Mr Woolsey says that federal prosecutors were dangerously wrong to believe Yousef was just another Muslim who was seduced by the radical cause while at a British university.

Mr Woolsey writes in the New Republic that one way to prove the confusion over identities is to examine the fingerprints taken from the genuine students, some of which are believed to be held by Scotland Yard. But what it will not do is answer the question of who Ramzi Yousef really is.

Mr Woolsey questions whether Saddam Hussein had a part to play in this conspiracy over fake identities, as the murders of the innocents happened during his occupation of Kuwait.

At the time of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, he says, it was easier to blame Osama bin Laden rather than examine who else was involved. What documentary evidence the security agencies found supported Yousef’s story that he had lived in Wales.

Security agencies now face a monumental task in unravelling all the identities of the hijackers and suspects to discover how many are false jackals. The fear is that most of the 19 suicide bombers were using fake identities.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001