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Al Qaeda Leader Abu Zubaydah Planning New Terror Attacks, Officials Say








Abu Zubaydah
Thursday, February 14, 2002

WASHINGTON — A 30-year-old, Saudi-born Palestinian is emerging as Usama bin
Laden's third-in-command, and U.S. officials believe he is actively
organizing Al Qaeda cells to commit new acts of terror against Americans.


U.S. officials said Thursday that they have assumed for some time that Abu
Zubaydah has assumed Al Qaeda's operational responsibilities following the
death of Muhammad Atef, the terror organization's former chief of operations,
who was killed by an American bomb in November.

Zubaydah has a thorough knowledge of Al Qaeda's entire worldwide network,
much of which he recruited.

The officials said Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad
Husayn Abu Zubaydah,  is believed to have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan
last fall, but his current whereabouts are unknown.

He is an expert at moving around the world undetected and has frequently
served as the only direct link between senior Al Qaeda members and the
organization's terrorist cells around the world.

According to a report in Thursday's New York Times, Zubaydah has been linked
directly to the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, as well as a wave of attacks that were planned to occur in
Europe last year — including plots to bomb the U.S. embassies in Paris and
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"He's as dangerous as anyone we are looking for, including bin Laden," a
senior law enforcement official told The Times.

Zubaydah, who has been one of bin Laden's top men for several years, uses
multiple passports and aliases and has taken great care to avoid being
photographed, the Times reported. One publicly available photograph is grainy
and indistinct; U.S. intelligence agencies are believed to have more recent
images.

Tall, light-complexioned and able to speak at least some English, Zubaydah
has managed to move continuously around the world undetected even as other Al
Qaeda officials outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan were captured in the years
following the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Despite his prominence, Zubaydah has been so elusive that American
law-enforcement officials have been unable to make any public charges against
him, and he was left off both the Most Wanted list put out by the FBI in
October and the list of potential terrorists issued by Attorney General John
Ashcroft on Monday.

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a wealthy family in the Palestinian
diaspora, Zubaydah did not become involved with militancy of any kind until
his 20s, when he met bin Laden.

"He's interesting for many reasons," The Times quoted a Bush administration
official as saying, "including the fact that he bypassed the more typical,
nationalist route that leads other Palestinians into terrorism.

"His central goal has never been a Palestinian state," the official
continued. "It's been the cause of Islamic extremism."

For a large part of the past decade, Zubaydah operated out of Peshawar,
Pakistan, supervising the thousands of young volunteers from around the
Muslim world who came to train with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

 Zubaydah would screen them in the Al Qaeda compound in Peshawar, known as
the "House of Martyrs," and also ran one of the training camps in Afghanistan
himself.

Even more significantly, it was Zubaydah who would meet the freshly trained
recruits upon their return from Afghanistan — and who would then assign each
one to Al Qaeda cells around the world.

American officials believe Zubaydah is one of the few men alive who knows the
names and missions of virtually all Al Qaeda operatives outside of
Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Zubaydah first drew notice from terrorism analysts when information was
received showing that he had masterminded the foiled "millennium plots" to
attack Los Angeles International Airport and tourist areas in Jordan on New
Year's Eve. He has been subsequently sentenced to death in absentia in
Jordan.

Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian whose arrest in December 1999 helped uncover the
millennium plots, testified at an accomplice's trial in July 2001 that
Zubaydah had received him as an Al Qaeda recruit in Peshawar in 1998.

"He is the person in charge of the camps," Ressam testified. "He receives
young men from all countries. He accepts you or rejects you. And he takes
care of the expenses of the camps. He made arrangements for you when you
travel, coming in or leaving."

Since Sept. 11 and the death of Atef in November, Zubaydah has apparently
risen to be the No. 3 man in Al Qaeda, third only to bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who merged his own organization with Al
Qaeda in 1998.

Zubaydah's satellite phone number was found programmed into the memory of a
cell phone used by a man thought to be the ringleader of the plot to blow up
the American Embassy in Sarajevo. The confession of one of the men in the
Paris embassy bomb plot, which operated out of Brussels, Belgium, linked him
to that planned attack as well.




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