-Caveat Lector-
Ship Attack Suspects Seemed Out of Place
By JOHN F. BURNS
ADEN, Yemen, Oct. 30 — Neighbors of the two Arab strangers who
came quietly in June to the cinder- block apartment at 9, Jabal
al Sakhra, high above Aden's harbor, now say there were quite a
few things that made them stand out, even among the disparate
group of people who have settled in the cascade of ramshackle
homes that tumbles chaotically down the hillside.
There were the men's thick accents, for one, as well as the
Islamic-style beard of the man who signed his name on a 12-month
lease as Abdullah Ahmed Khaled al-Musawah, a thickset man of
about 30 with heavy spectacles, and the neatly trimmed goatee of
his still more taciturn companion, a slightly built,
darker-skinned man described as being between 25 and 28.
Beyond that, the neighbors say, there was the men's seeming
obsession with privacy, the frugality of the food they bought in
the local market and their curious comings and goings at the dead
of night.
Then there were the contradictions. Neighbors said the men
described themselves as fish merchants but recalled that nobody
working in the fish market in the port had ever seen the two
there.
In addition, there was the apparent clash between the men's
seeming Islamic convictions — investigators found a well-thumbed
copy of the Koran in the apartment — and the fact that they were
never seen going to prayers in the new, whitewashed mosque that
is the pride of the neighborhood, only 100 paces further up the
hill.
Still, according to those living around the two-story apartment
with a panoramic view of Aden's harbor, none of that was so
incongruous that anybody imagined that the men might be using
their rented, $50-a-month apartment to plan the suicide bombing
attack on an American warship.
Only after the men disappeared suddenly, before dawn on Oct. 12
— the day when two suicide bombers rammed the destroyer Cole in
the harbor, killing 17 American sailors, wounding 39 others and
almost sinking the guided missile warship — did people begin to
think that they might have paid closer attention to the two
strangers.
Now, with eyewitnesses' descriptions of the two men who boarded
the boat that rammed the Cole exactly matching the appearance,
accents and clothing of the two men who lived in the apartment,
neighbors are convinced that the apartment dwellers and the
suicide bombers were the same people.
According to Saleh Shayef, owner of the house immediately
overlooking No. 9, the strangers were hardly ever glimpsed in
daylight and limited themselves when addressed by others to
"marhaba" and "maa assalama," meaning hello and goodbye in the
Arabic used in Yemen.
But he said they were like many others living in the Jabal al
Sakhra, or Rock Hill, district: migrants from far away in Yemen's
north, non- Yemeni Arabs trading in fish and arms and other
contraband and scores of other ne'er-do-wells with compelling
reasons for avoiding engagements with strangers.
"What would I gain by asking them what they were doing and why
they were here?" said Mr. Shayef, a father of six who lost his
government job in the turmoil of civil war in 1994. "They would
have told me to mind my own business, and they would have been
right. Anyway, everybody keeps to himself around here. We go to
bed early, after the evening prayers, so there weren't many
chances to talk to them. We'd hear them come home at 11 p.m.
or later, and if they went out at all they'd be gone by dawn."
Eighteen days after the Cole attack, a visit to the neighborhood
on Rock Hill provided important new pieces to the scant,
scattered jigsaw puzzle of information that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Yemeni investigators, citing a need not to
"chill leads" in the case with premature disclosures, have been
willing to divulge.
Accompanied by an Arabic-speaking companion and liberated briefly
by a lapse in the strict limits the Yemeni security police have
imposed on American journalists, the visit also afforded this
reporter, for the first time, telling glimpses of what may have
been the personal and religious journey the bombers took to their
deadly encounter with the Cole.
The visit, from midafternoon on Sunday until nightfall, offered
clues to some of the factors weighing on the bombers' minds as
they waited out the weeks and months before the attack.
The apartment on Rock Hill seems perfectly fashioned, in
hindsight, as a hideout for what they had in mind. About a third
of the way up a 1,800-
foot-high volcanic mountain, Jebel Shamsan, that dominates Aden
and provides shelter for the harbor, the sparse, two-room
apartment has a spectacular, unimpeded view of the harbor.
Barely a mile away, the men could see the floating refueling
dock, known as a Dolphin, that had been used more two dozen times
since April 1999, when United States warships, for the first time
in the decades since Yemen fell into chaos and civil war, began
using Aden for brief refueling visits.
Beyond that, the twin windows in the front of the flat, looking
out from the sparse, felt-carpeted room that did double duty as a
living space and bedroom, gave a view far across the harbor to
the west.
Straining their eyes, they could just about see the point on the
horizon six miles away where, on a muddy inlet beside a bridge
leading to the outlying district of Little Aden. That is where
the suicide bombers were seen launching a small fiberglass boat
into the water and disappearing out into the bay about 30 minutes
before the bombing stopped the clocks on the Cole's bridge at
11:18 a.m. on Oct. 12.
In effect, this gave the men a view of the entire route the
bombing plan required, from the inlet across the Bay of Aden,
over the open water to the point where the bombers skirted the
end of a long man-made promontory that is the base for Aden's new
container port, then onward down the flank of the container port
to the point where the Cole was moored.
>From what Navy officials have disclosed, this meant that the
bombers would have been able to watch, and time, at least half a
dozen American warships that visited Aden for refueling between
June and October, including an identical ship to the Cole, the
Barry, which visited Aden in late August.
>From the visit to Rock Hill, and neighbors' descriptions of the
two men who lived in the hideout, it seems possible, even highly
probable, that the residents were the very men who carried out
the suicide attack, after first renting the Rock Hill flat and
the two safe houses in Little Aden where the fiberglass skiff
used in the attack was mated to a huge homemade bomb.
Whether there were others who helped conceive or carry out the
plan, beyond a carpenter and a welder who have been arrested, and
whether the bombers acted in an isolated cell or were part of a
wider conspiracy, is something F.B.I. and Yemeni investigators
are still struggling to determine, American officials say.
Descriptions given by Rock Hill neighbors — of Mr. Musawah and
of his companion, who never gave a name that any of the neighbors
could recall — almost precisely matched descriptions given by
Yemenis who saw two men slip a fiberglass boat into the bay.
In those accounts, given by several people who were out walking
or fishing at the Little Aden inlet when the two bombers pulled
up in a red Nissan four-wheel-drive vehicle with a boat trailer,
one of the men was thickly bearded, heavyset and wearing
spectacles, while the other was darker-skinned, slighter and with
a well-trimmed beard.
According to the landlord of the apartment, who gave his name as
Yahya, both men spoke a heavily accented Arabic suggesting that
they came from Hadhramaut, a remote province of eastern Yemen
whose arid deserts and rocky mountains are a known haven for
Islamic terrorist groups, and which is famous for its small
fiberglass boats called houris that are used for fishing in the
Arabian Sea.
Hadhramaut is also the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, the son
of a Saudi Arabian billionaire and the FBI's most-wanted
terrorist.
The younger, darker-skinned man was said to have spoken in a
"Gulf accent," something common among the large numbers of
Hadramis — natives of Hadhramaut — who have migrated to work in
Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.
The men asked for no help from their neighbors and paid for the
first four months of their lease in advance, but they left
without paying for October, a fact that seemed to trouble the
landlord. "I was angry," he said. "There was nothing Islamic in
that."
The trail that led to the flat began a week ago on Friday, when
Yemeni investigators stumbled on a 12-year- old boy who had seen
the fiberglass boat launched and told them that he had been paid
2,000 Yemeni riyals, the equivalent of $12.50, to watch the
vehicle while the men were gone. That led the Yemenis, via the
other safe houses, to Rock Hill.
Despite all the discoveries, American officials have insisted
that the F.B.I. has no firm clues as to who the bombers were,
which country they hailed from or what links, if any, they may
have had to the worldwide Islamic militant movement of "jihadis"
who have declared a "holy war" against the United States.
The F.B.I. and the Yemeni security police have placed the
tightest of lids on the case, so it is not known how much the
investigators learned on Rock Hill. The Yemenis also have denied
the F.B.I. the right to speak directly to witnesses or suspects,
a fact that may explain accounts from Rock Hill residents who say
the F.B.I. never spoke to any of the neighbors. Almost the only
thing that the Yemenis have said about the evidence found in the
Rock Hill apartment is that a driving license issued in the name
of Mr. Musawah, the man who rented the apartment and used the
license as proof of his identity, proved to have been issued in a
false name.
"I watched them from my roof for two days, but they never came
anywhere near me," said Mr. Shayef. He described the F.B.I.
agents as having arrived a week ago on Saturday wearing overalls
stenciled with the F.B.I. logo and wearing plastic gloves. He
said they left on Sunday afternoon with plastic evidence bags in
which, according to Mr. Yahya, they had placed two sponge
mattresses, quilts used for bedding and a wealth of Islamic
books.
One of the few cracks in this wall of silence came on Sunday,
when the spectacle of the Cole being towed out of the harbor on
the first leg of its journey home captured the attention of the
security agents who were supposed to be minding reporters,
creating a chance to visit Rock Hill.
It took several false starts, darting this way and that on the
rocky, garbage-strewn hillside, to find No. 9. Even people
living 100 yards away seemed unaware of the drama that had may
have played out in the flat, or at least were unwilling to admit
that they knew.
>From the visit, it seems likely that one version of the bombing
plot that has circulated widely here — that there was a separate
group of men monitoring the harbor from the Rock Hill flat,
refining details of the plan and possibly guiding the bombers to
their target — seems less likely.
In addition, the indications that the same men hired the Little
Aden safe houses, assembled the boat and bomb and conducted
surveillance from the house on Rock Hill raise questions about
earlier suspicions that the conspiracy may have involved large
numbers of people inside Yemen, in neighboring Arab countries and
possibly in Afghanistan, where the man widely considered to be
the leader of the jihadis, Mr. bin Laden, lives in hiding.
Mr. bin Laden, who has been indicted in New York in the bombings
in August 1998 of two American Embassies in East Africa that
killed more than 220 people and injured about a thousand others,
has been cited by American officials here as a leading suspect in
the Cole bombing, although only by inference.
Three weeks before the bombing, Mr. bin Laden's underground
network delivered a videotape in which Mr. bin Laden called for
renewed attacks on United States forces.
Many people in the Rock Hill neighborhood arrived as squatters
fleeing a civil war that killed 13,000 people in Aden alone by
the time the fighting ended in 1994. Mr. Shayef, who watched
the F.B.I. from his roof, said he had nothing but contempt for
the men who attacked the Cole.
"This couldn't have been done for Islam, because Islam forbids
such acts," Mr. Shayef, 45, said. He added, "The Cole may have
been a warship, but Aden is a port, and it should welcome all the
sailors."
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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