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 Top al-Qaida Official Captured in Sudan (Washn)
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WASHINGTON _ A senior associate of Osama bin Laden who is on President Bush's most wanted list of international terrorists for allegedly helping plan the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in east Africa has been captured in Sudan, senior administration officials said Monday.
U.S. officials have been negotiating for more than a month with the Sudanese government to have Abu Anas Liby transferred to Egypt because he also allegedly took part in planning an attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak in June 1995, according to an official familiar with the negotiations.
Liby is the most senior al-Qaida member to be arrested since the United States launched its war on terrorism. He is the first person captured alive among the administration's group of most wanted terrorists, a roster of 22 names released on Oct. 10.
U.S. authorities have a warrant for Liby's arrest but appear willing to have him transferred to Egypt, citing his alleged participation in the attempt on Mubarak's life, which took place before the embassy bombings. However, another practical reason is that Egyptian security officials are not bound in interrogation of prisoners by the same rules that apply to U.S. law enforcement agents.
As the most senior official of bin Laden's al-Qaida network in custody, Liby would potentially be an extremely valuable source on information about the terrorist network, which the United States says plotted and carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Liby's arrest was first disclosed in the Sunday Times of London. It reported he was one of nine terrorists arrested by the Sudanese government last month and is currently the subject of discussions with U.S. officials.
A senior Sudanese official, presidential adviser Ghazi Salah Din, told reporters Monday: ``We in the government do not have any knowledge of this and I do not think that this is correct.''
A CIA spokesman said he would not comment on the matter. But other U.S. government officials confirmed the arrest of Liby and that negotiations with the Sudanese government were under way.
Born and raised in Tripoli, Libya, Liby, 37, joined al-Qaida in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Around that time, after a crackdown on Muslim extremists by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, he fled his home country for Sudan, where bin Laden had established a beachhead.
Liby has a reputation as a whiz at computers and high-tech gadgetry, and he soon earned a place on al-Qaida's ruling council, or shura. He left Sudan before bin Laden's departure for Afghanistan in 1996, moving to Qatar before settling in Manchester, England.
The British government granted him political asylum after he expressed a fear of persecution if sent home _ although it is unclear which country he said could harm him. After he was indicted two years ago in New York in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, British law enforcement authorities went to his home to arrest him, but found he had fled.
Agents of the British Special Branch discovered incriminating evidence at his home, though, including a 180-page terrorist manual recorded on a computer disk. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has described the document as ``a how-to guide for terrorists that instructs enemy operatives in the art of killing in a free society.''
The manual was introduced into evidence in the trial stemming from the Nairobi embassy bombing that killed 213 people, including 12 Americans. It is divided into numerous sections. They include ``Kidnapping enemy personnel,'' ``Spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy,'' and ``Blasting and destroying the embassies.''
It contains instructions on how to use forged documents, how to prepare cover stories if detained by police and how to act if jailed (``complain of mistreatment while in prison'').
Meanwhile, terrorism experts said Liby had made his way to Afghanistan, where he apparently helped lead at least the early phase of al-Qaida's resistance to the U.S. military operation that began Oct. 7. It is not known when he traveled to Sudan.
Two former al-Qaida operatives who testified in the Kenya embassy bombing trial last year met and worked with Liby, according to court testimony.
L'Houssiane Kherchtou, who was in Kenya in late 1994 studying to be a pilot for bin Laden's private aircraft, said that he had been in Afghanistan training with Liby in surveillance techniques. Liby traveled to Nairobi in 1994 with camera equipment, Kherchtou testified.
He said Liby was accompanied by their former surveillance instructor, Ali Mohamad, an Egyptian American who pleaded guilty to participation in planning the embassy bombings.
Kherchtou testified that he saw Liby one day on the street about 400 yards from the U.S. embassy building taking pictures, and that Liby developed them while in Kherchtou's Nairobi apartment.
Pictures were a key part of the al-Qaida planning for terrorist bombing attacks, according to Jamal Ahmed Fadl, the second former al-Qaida member who testified at the bombing trial. Fadl, who worked in Sudan for bin Laden in the early 1990s, also knew Liby during that time. He said Liby used two computers and taught others how to put surveillance information collected on computers and transfer the data to disks ``so as to be easier to carry.''
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