Tortured for 7 yrs, Guantanamo Five judicially suicided

[TonyGosling]

Torture Might Doom Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s, Four Others 9-11 Guilty Plea
By Spencer Ackerman 12/8/08 10:26 AM
Unexpected developments at work. Today at Guantanamo Bay, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, long known to be the mastermind of Sept. 11, pleaded guilty to the attacks in their military tribunals! But it might all be undone by the fact of Mohammed’s torture.
Human Rights Watch, which is on hand at Guantanamo to assess the tribunals, sent out this statement:
“What should have been a major victory in holding the 9/11 defendants accountable for terrible crimes has been tainted by torture and an unfair military commissions process,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “These five men are known to have been mistreated and tortured during their years in CIA custody, including the acknowledged waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”
Daskal continues:
Under the rules of the military commissions, a judge cannot accept a guilty plea unless he determines that the plea is voluntary and free of coercion.
“In light of the men’s severe mistreatment and torture, the judge should require a full and thorough factual inquiry to determine whether or not these pleas are voluntary,” Daskal said.
We know that KSM, as he’s known in the counterterrorism world, was waterboarded. Waterboarding is torture. Torture may have just cost the U.S. a guilty plea in a 9/11 tribunal. All thanks are due to George Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, John Yoo, and George Tenet. Was torturing this evil man worth it?
http://washingtonindependent.com/21285/khalid-shaikh-mohammed-four-oth ers-plead-guilty-to-911-and-torture-might-doom-the-plea

[keithm]

if i was tortured for 7yrs,i would confess to,

maybe even try to eat myself.

[TonyGosling]

........Mohammed had earlier said he desired execution to achieve martyrdom. The alleged al Qaeda number three man, has confessed to planning the hijacking of four passenger planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z. I was the operational director for Sheikh Usama [Osama] bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up and execution of the 9/11 operation," Mohammed admitted in 2007 according to US military transcripts.
The US has long been criticized for human rights violation and the use of harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay.
He, however, later claimed translators "put many words in my mouth" under torture. The CIA has admitted to using the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding.
Talks of the tribunal, yet to be scheduled, come amid great uncertainty about the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where more than 250 inmates are held.
While the legal status of Gitmo inmates and the interrogation techniques used on them has drawn fierce global criticism, US President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close down Guantanamo, saying, "We're going to restore habeas corpus."

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=77865&sectionid=3510203

[Disco_Destroyer]

Some say we moved out of the dark ages

[dewstru]

Wasn't that Mark Bingham's mum once again being wheeled out by the bush regime as 911 victim relative to sit in the gitmo kangaroo courtroom? Why not ask the Jersey girls or other members of the families steering cmmt'?another coincidence is this being rushed before W makes his exit.

[TonyGosling]

My God, I think you're right.
Alice Hoglan or Hoagland?
Take your pick.
Mark Bingham's mother?
Here she is.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gga6BqhVY0
She seems more sincere here though than in the original interviews immediately post 9/11.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3677405780071691894

[Disco_Destroyer]

http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

US threat to withhold intelligence from Britain over Guantanamo evidence 05 Feb 2009 The US has threatened to withhold intelligence from Britain if evidence of the alleged torture of a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay is made public. Details of how the "terrorist" detainee was allegedly tortured - and what British intelligence services knew about it - must remain secret because of the American threats, the High Court ruled yesterday.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25010986-2703,00.ht ml

Evidence of torture 'buried by ministers' --Judges condemn secrecy over files detailing treatment of suspect by CIA 05 Feb 2009 The government was accused last night of hiding behind claims of a threat to national security to suppress evidence of torture by the CIA on a prisoner still held in Guantánamo Bay. An unprecedented high court ruling yesterday blamed the US, with British connivance, for keeping the "powerful evidence" secret, sparking criticism from lawyers, campaigners and MPs, who claimed the government had capitulated to American bullying.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/guantanamo-bay-torture

US threats mean evidence of British resident's Guantánamo torture must stay secret, judges rule 04 Feb 2009 Evidence of how a British resident held in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was tortured, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because of serious threats the US has made against the UK, the high court ruled today. The judges made clear they were deeply unhappy with their decision, but said they had no alternative as a result of a statement by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, that if the evidence was disclosed the US would stop sharing intelligence with Britain. That would directly threaten the UK's national security, Miliband had told the court.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/guantanamo-torture

GOP Bill to Block Funding for Guantanamo Bay Closure 05 Feb 2009 U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-Sociopath-S.C.) made the following statement after he joined U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Whackjob-Okla.) and others in sponsoring the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Safe Closure Act. The bill would prohibit the use of any federal funds to transfer detainees currently being held prisoner at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to any facility in the United States. In addition, the bill would prohibit any funds to modify or construct any facility in the United States to house enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay.
http://www.wspa.com/spa/news/local/article/new_bill_to_block_funding_f or_guantanamo_bay_closure/14300/

Panetta: Waterboarders should not be prosecuted 05 Feb 2009 CIA Director nominee Leon Panetta says the CIA interrogators who used waterboarding or other harsh techniques torture against prisoners on the authority of the White House should not be prosecuted. Panetta told a Senate panel on Thursday that those individuals should not be prosecuted or investigated if they acted pursuant to the law as presented by the attorney general.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iNqjrsQ96LSw38bHitci nz_SQAWgD965KVC00

[scienceplease 2]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8153842.stm

[scienceplease 2]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1275325.html

[scienceplease 2]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/1319172.html

Senate rejects effort to block civilian trials for 9/11 suspects

[scienceplease 2]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29661.html

[outsider]

Omar Deghayes' Guantanamo resistance led to him being deliberately blinded in one eye:

http://www.countercurrents.org/barkham230110.htm

[Mark Gobell]

EDIT: This forum has the original story here

Old news now I know, but I didn't know about this.

Just been reading up on KSM and his "confession".

I hadn't realised that among all of the other things that KSM confessed to in March 2007 was the following:

On page 18 of his confession transcript we see the following:

7. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks against the following skyscrapers after 9/11:

a. Library Tower, California
b. Sears Tower, Chicago
c. Plaza Bank, Washington state
d. The Empire State Building, New York City

The problem:

From the About section of the website of the Plaza Bank, Washington State, you will still be able to read this little factoid:

Why Plaza Bank?

An idea that began with a conversation between two regional business leaders, Mike Sotelo and Cris Guillen, has become the most widely anticipated Bank launch in the Pacific Northwest.

Founded in early 2006, with a vision of creating...

Now, you might be able to see one of the other benefits of torture in addition to being able to remember things that haven't even happened, some torture victims can even be imbued with the ultimate skill of being able to see into the future.

There's an excellent Taking Aim radio programme here with Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone explaining everything about the "confession."

Paul Joseph Watson has this article at Global Research, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed "Confessed" To Attacking Bank Founded After His Arrest

[Mark Gobell]

Raided family of microbiologist denies official version of al-Qaida arrests

* Rory McCarthy in Rawalpindi
* The Guardian, Monday 3 March 2003 01.33 GMT

US and Pakistani officials were last night questioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the September 11 attacks and al-Qaida kingpin arrested in a dramatic swoop over the weekend.

His arrest was hailed by officials in Washington as a significant blow to Osama bin Laden's network. "That's fantastic," George Bush told his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, when she passed on the news.

Other US officials were even more effusive. "This is a very huge event. This is the equivalent of the liberation of Paris during the second world war," Porter Goss, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said.

Mohammed was captured in a raid on a private house on Saturday in Rawalpindi. Pakistani intelligence service agents were initially believed to have handed him straight over to US officials.

He was said to have been flown out of the country to an undisclosed location.

However this was denied by the Pakistani government which insisted he was still in their hands and was being jointly questioned.

Yesterday the Khan family who live at the two-storey grey house at 18a Nisar Road, where officials say they found Mohammed, gave a very different account of the raid.

Dr Abdul Quddus Khan, 78, a retired microbiologist who runs a respected cardiology institute lives at the house with his wife Mahlaqa, their son Ahmed, 42, his wife and their two young children. Dr Khan and his wife were at a wedding in Lahore on Friday.

At 3am on Saturday a squad of around 20 armed police and intelligence officers kicked open the door and burst into the house. They dragged away Ahmed and held his wife and children at gunpoint for an hour as they ransacked the house, according to Ahmed's sister Qudsia.

"They left clothes and books strewn on the floor and took a bundle of dollar bills which were locked in a cupboard," she said. "The bedrooms were turned upside down, one door upstairs was broken and they took the new computer," she said.

At no point, the family say, was Mohammed or any other man in the house. The agents did not even ask about them. "The only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids," Qudsia said. "I have absolutely no idea why the police came here."

Officials at Pakistan's interior ministry insist they found Mohammed and one other Arab al-Qaida suspect in the house and arrested them at the same time as Ahmed was detained. Yet the family and their supporters challenge the official account and say Mohammed must have been arrested in another raid at another time.

[Mark Gobell]

ABC News Australia

Pakistani's family shocked by Al Qaeda arrest

Posted Sun Mar 2, 2003 11:00pm AEDT

The sister of a Pakistani arrested in a swoop that authorities say also netted the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks has said he was the only man present at the time of the raid and had no ties to any extremist group.

Pakistani authorities said on Saturday local time they had arrested three Al Qaeda suspects in an early morning raid on a house in the city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad.

Those held included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and 41-year-old Pakistani Ahmed Quddus, they said.

An intelligence source said the third man was an Egyptian national, but gave no details.

However, members of Quddus's family said he was the only person arrested in a raid by 20 to 25 security men armed with Kalashnikov rifles on their house in Westridge, a middle-class area of Rawalpindi at 22:30 GMT Friday.

"My brother was the only man in the house when the raid took place," his sister Qudsia Khanum said.

"He was taken away while his wife and kids were herded into a room and locked in.

"They didn't even know when they took him... or where.

"My brother has never been involved in any bad things.

"Actually, he's a bit slow, he's not very clever, so I can't even begin to imagine that he could be involved with any terrorist organisation.

"He does not have any links with any terrorist organisation.

"They're saying such strange things about him in the press.

"He's been living in the neighbourhood for 15 years and everyone knows him to be a placid person," she said.

Ms Qudsia said her mother was a district administrator of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic political party, and her father a retired microbiologist who used to work for the United Nations and had lived abroad.

She said he was in Lahore for a wedding at the time of the raid.

"He's a heart patient so we had to break the news gently to him," she said.

Computer seized

Ahmed's cousin Omar Khan, a medical doctor, said the security men took away a computer when they searched the house.

Some analysts questioned whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had actually been arrested on Saturday and speculated he may have been held for some time.

"I think he was arrested several months ago in the shootout in Karachi," one expert on Pakistan who declined to be identified said, referring to a gunbattle in September in the southern port city that netted another Al Qaeda figure, Ahmed Omar Abdel Rahman, known as Binalshibh.

Mohammed was reported to have narrowly evaded capture in that battle, when Karachi police identified him as a man hit by a police sniper.

But a suspected militant later denied this.

Another terror expert said several weeks ago he believed Mohammed had been arrested and that he expected the news would be only be made public when it was in the interests of the United States and Pakistan.

The first analyst said the arrest could make Islamic militants even more wary of the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that they had considered an ally when the country was backing the Taliban in Afghanistan before September 11.

"Those who think they have ISI protection will stop feeling that comfort level," he said.

Pakistani officials said on Sunday local time that Mohammed had been handed over to US custody soon after his arrest.

[Mark Gobell]

Robert Fisk: A breakthrough in the war on terror? I'll believe it when we see some evidence

Monday, 3 March 2003

The Independent

In the theatre of the absurd into which America's hunt for al-Qa'ida so often descends, the "arrest" – the quotation marks are all too necessary – of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory.

First, Mr Mohammed was arrested in a joint raid by the CIA and Pakistani agents near Islamabad and spirited out of the country to an "undisclosed location". "The man who masterminded the September 11 attacks" was how the US billed this latest "victory" in the "war against terror" (again, quotation marks are obligatory). Then the Pakistanis announced that he hadn't been taken out of Pakistan at all. Then a Pakistani police official expressed his ignorance of any such arrest.

And then, a Taliban "source" – this means the real Taliban but "source" is supposed to cover the fact that the old Afghan regime still exists – claimed that Mr Mohammed "is still with us and in our protection and we challenge the US to prove their claim". By this stage, it looked like a case of the "whoops" school of journalism; a good story that just might be untrue.

Not least because the last post known to be held by the former Kuwaiti with a Pakistani passport was media adviser to the marriage of Osama bin Laden's son in Kandahar in January of 2001. Then there was the slow revelation that the man whose supposed arrest was described by Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, as "a wonderful blow to inflict on al-Qa'ida" had been handed over to the Pakistani authorities (if indeed he had been handed over) by the ISI, the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence – for whom Mr Mohammed used to work.

Like the man accused of arranging the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Mr Mohammed was an ISI asset; indeed, anyone who is "handed over" by the ISI these days is almost certainly a former (or present) employee of the Pakistani agency, whose control of Taliban operatives amazed even the Pakistani government during the years before 2001. Mr Pearl, it should be remembered, arranged his fatal assignation in Karachi on a mobile phone from an ISI office.

True, Mr Mohammed is the uncle of the 1993 World Trade Centre conspirator Ramzi Yousef and a brother of an al-Qa'ida operative. True, another brother was killed in a bomb explosion in Pakistan – he was allegedly making the bomb at the time. But claims that he was the 11 September "mastermind" – "It's hard to overstate how significant this is," the ever loquacious Mr Fleischer told the world yesterday – are still unprovable. Hitherto, the nearest to a "mastermind" anyone got was Mounir al-Motassadeq, who was jailed in Germany last month as an accessory to mass murder.

The deep waters were also muddied by the White House's claim that four men executed in an attack by a missile-firing pilotless drone aircraft in Yemen last year were "among al-Qa'ida's top 20 leaders". Whether they were numbers 2 to 5 or 17 to 20, no one at the Pentagon or White House could say. So how can we trust the authorities' word that Mr Mohammed is a "mastermind"?

Of course, it may all turn out to be true. We may be provided with the proof the Taliban demand. Or Mr Mohammed may be kept in Pakistani custody until another "mastermind" can be discovered. Or it may be that reports of the "arrest" of the likes of Mr Mohammed are very useful to General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's President, when he's just angered the Americans by criticising any US military attack on Iraq, or when Pakistan's new regional government in the North West Frontier province has just instituted Taliban-style laws in Peshawar.

All in all – as far as Mr Mohammed's arrest and deportation and then his non-deportation are concerned – when constabulary duty's to be done, a policeman's lot is not a happy one. Especially if he belongs to the ISI.

[Mark Gobell]

Was Khalid arrested where the FBI said he was?

LONDON–Inside the villa in Rawalpindi where police say they arrested Khalid, an old woman sobbed gently, shoulders shaking, as she gathered a black shawl around her head and across her mouth and nose so that only her eyes were visible, writes Christina Lamb.

Mrs Mahlaqa Khanum is the mother of Ahmed Qadoos, the 42-year-old Pakistani accused of sheltering the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. Qadoos was arrested in the raid on the house that police say netted Khalid and another top Al-Qaeda suspect.

The family is no stranger to controversy. Qadoos is a cousin of Dr Hasnat Khan, the Pakistani heart surgeon with whom Diana, Princess of Wales, was said to be in love. But Khanum said any idea that her son was sheltering terrorists who are on the FBI’s most wanted list was “impossible”.

Pointing at a large cage of blue and green budgerigars on the terrace, she said: “These are his life. Ahmed is a very simple person. He had no job, he hardly went out, just to the mosque to pray. He never travelled and his main thing was pets. He loved pets. We wouldn’t let him have a dog because we’re an Islamic family, but he loved his budgies.”

Qadoos would watch the army dog-training centre behind the house for hours. His mother produced a medical report describing him as a “low IQ person” and a letter about his condition from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for which her husband, Dr Abdul Qadoos, a microbiologist, worked for 30 years in several countries.

A heart bypass operation forced the doctor to retire in 1985 while he was in Zambia. Now he is managing director of Hearts International, a cardiac hospital in Rawalpindi, although his own heart condition has made him frail.

The description of Qadoos as a simpleton is supported by the family’s neighbour, Colonel Shahida of the Pakistani army.

“Ahmed can’t be a terrorist,” he laughed. “He’s a goof, simple in the head. Once he shot himself in the hand because he was cleaning a gun with the barrel against his palm. They are a purdah-observing household. We never saw anyone strange enter the house.”

Kkanum and her husband were at a wedding in Lahore when their house was raided. Ahmed Qadoos, his wife and their two children Aisha, 12, and Bilal, 8, were sleeping in a downstairs room when they were woken by a loud bang. The door was forced open and about 25 police officers rushed in.

Qadoos’s wife said she and the children were pushed into a spare room and told to remain silent, guarded by an armed policeman, while for more than an hour officers ransacked the house.

“We were petrified,” she said.

When they left she called her cousin, Dr Surbuland, who lives in the next street. “It was about 4.15am. She was very confused and at first we thought Ahmed had been kidnapped because they had taken some dollars,” he said. “Everything had been turned upside down.”

The family have been given no information since then and were horrified to read in newspapers that Qadoos had been charged with sheltering a terrorist. “I’m so worried for him,” said his mother. “He was taken in his vest with no shoes, nothing – and he had flu.”

American and Pakistani intelligence officials say items including a laptop computer, a satellite phone, letters, cassettes of Osama Bin Laden and documents were seized during the raid.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Qadoos’s mother. “They took my diaries and address book, a box of family photographs, tapes of the Koran that I like listening to and a computer we bought last month for the children.”
Qadoos’s daughter Aisha said: “It was our computer. We didn’t even have the internet. It just had some games – Aladdin and The Lion King.”

It certainly seems an unlikely hideout for a terrorist on the FBI’s most wanted list – although, of course, that could make it ideal. Not only is the suburb of Westridge mostly inhabited by army families, but it is less than a mile from the headquarters of Pakistan’s army, which has ruled the country for more than half the time since it became independent. The peaceful streets could not be more different from the teeming bustle of Rawalpindi.

Ahmed Qadoos’s mother is an activist for the ladies’ wing of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), Pakistan’s biggest religious party – an allegiance noted by Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the information minister, who announced the arrests.

“There is definitely a pattern here,” Rashid said. “This is the third time Al-Qaeda big fish are being picked up from the house of a Jamaat-e-Islami supporter.”

He pointed out that both Ramzi Binalshibh, the suspected 20th hijacker arrested in Karachi last September, and Abu Zubaydah, arrested last March, were discovered in houses belonging to JI members.

Qazi Hussein Ahmed, leader of the party, which is part of the opposition and is engaged in a campaign for General Pervez Musharraf either to step down as army chief or to renounce the presidency, is furious at the allegation.

“We’re an open organisation,” he said.

“We will give shelter to womenfolk and orphans, but not to anyone violent or to wanted persons.”

Intelligence officers say another pattern that seems to be emerging is the use of doctors’ houses as hideouts. In a war in which 1.5m people were killed and at least as many lost limbs, hundreds of thousands of mujaheddin fighting in Afghanistan were treated by Pakistani doctors and relationships may have developed.

While there is no doubting the huge importance of the capture of Khalid, last week’s raid does leave many unanswered questions.Would he really be travelling with phones, laptop computers, documents and lists of names in an organisation that for the past two years has relied on foot messengers, knowing that phone calls can be intercepted and used to trace their position?

The Qadoos family point to the photo of Khalid released by Pakistani authorities, purportedly showing him under arrest in the house, looking fat and dazed in a baggy vest as he stands against a wall of peeling paint. A thorough search of the house shows there is no such wall.

“The family is lying,” insisted the information minister. However, he admitted that it was “perhaps unlikely” that Ahmed Qadoos was mixed up with Al-Qaeda, suggesting the real link was to another family member.

Courtesy The Sunday Times.


Notes:

This article was retrieved form the Web Archive using this URL

It was published on-line by The Nation in Pakistan and I assume it to be a facsimile of the article originally published in the Sunday Times by Christina Lamb that was originally at this web address under the title "Was Khalid arrested where the FBI said he was?"

[Mark Gobell]

Asia Times Online

A chilling inheritance of terror
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Ever since the frenzied shootout last month on September 11 in Karachi there have been doubts over whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed head of al-Qaeda's military committee, died in the police raid on his apartment.

Certainly, another senior al-Qaeda figure, Ramzi Binalshibh, widely attributed as being the coordinator of the September 11 attacks on the United States a year earlier, was taken alive and handed over to the US. The latest information is that he is on a US warship somewhere in the Gulf.

Now it has emerged that Kuwaiti national Khalid Shaikh Mohammed did indeed perish in the raid, but his wife and child were taken from the apartment and handed over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in whose hands they remain.

Sources close to Pakistani intelligence agents say that the wife, under intense interrogation, has revealed information that is likely to lead to a new crackdown in Pakistan, as well as in Southeast Asia.

After the Taliban and al-Qaeda were routed in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, many fled to Pakistan to regroup and set up new cells. One of these, as described in Asia Times Online, From the al-Qaeda puzzle, a picture emerges, was in Karachi, with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as its head.

Despite being tracked by informers within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been described as "probably the only man who knows all the [al-Qaeda] pieces of the puzzle", always managed to remain one step ahead of any raiding parties in the slum areas along the coastal belt of Karachi.

However, it was then learned that Shaikh Mohammed had established connections with some local groups, including underworld figures, to entrench his cell. Using highly sensitive equipment, in April a call was tracked to someone by the name of Arif, living in the densely populated southwestern part of the city. Arif spoke to a Tunisian, passing on a message from Shaikh Mohammed. Subsequently, the Tunisian is believed to be the man who rammed a truck laden with explosives into a Jewish synagogue in Djerba in Tunisia in which many French and German citizens died.

After this suicide attack, the FBI were onto Shaikh Mohammed in a big way, and, no doubt not entirely without coincidence, on September 11 they decided on a showdown at the apartment of Shaikh Mohammed, his wife and child, in the Defense Housing Authority near Korangi Road. A number of Arabs were also living in the apartment at the time.

Initially, the joint ISI-FBI plan was to take Shaikh Mohammed alive so that he could be grilled, especially as he was believed to have knowledge of other al-Qaeda cells in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere. However, as a plainclothed officer climbed the stairs toward the third-floor apartment, a hand grenade was thrown, and he retreated. Reinforcements then arrived, and for the next few hours a fierce gun battle blazed.

The FBI, still keen to take Shaikh Mohammed alive, teargassed the area, and a number of people were captured. However, despite instructions to the contrary, a few Pakistan Rangers entered the flat, where they found Shaikh Mohammed and another man, allegedly with their hands up. The Rangers nevertheless opened fire on the pair.

Later, the Pakistani press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of Kalma, in Arabic: "There is no God except Allah, Mohammed is his messenger"). An official who was present in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained from him.

Subsequently, to their surprise, the raiders learned that Ramzi Binalshibh had been netted in the swoop. And nothing further was said of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

But now it emerges that an Arab woman and a child were taken to an ISI safe house, where they identified the Shaikh Mohammed's body as their husband and father. The body was kept in a private NGO mortuary for 20 days before being buried, under the surveillance of the FBI, in a graveyard in the central district of Karachi.

The widow subsequently underwent exhaustive interrogation in the custody of FBI officials, during which she revealed details of people who visited her husband, and of his other contacts and plans. News of the death of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was intentionally suppressed so that officials could play on the power of his name to follow up leads and contacts.

From this it emerges that, in particular, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was in close contact with the Rabitatul Mujahideen, an alliance formed by Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah to act as a central committee for leaders of the various militant groups in Southeast Asia. He was also in touch with dissident groups within the Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistani-based militant group that has been active in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in Indian-administered Kashmir, and another Pakistani militia, the Ansarul Islam.

Intelligence officials now believe that through these links a new wave of terror will be unleashed - and officials have already taken the precaution to warn the intelligence agencies of friendly countries to check the lists of all people who have undergone flight training in the past six months: They have been led to believe that another World Trade Center/Pentagon attack is being planned, although not on a target in the US.

Shoestring: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Dead Man Confesses to Being 9/11 Mastermind