Dokumentene som er avslørt skjult i pornofilmer viser at Al Qaida sto bak 7/7-selvmordsbombene i London.
From CNN. Editor’s note: This story is based on a 46-page internal al Qaeda document, details of which were obtained by CNN. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official told CNN that U.S. authorities have concluded it was written by British al Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf. It was discovered by German cryptologists, along with more than 100 other documents, embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk belonging to a suspected al Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last May. The German newspaper Die Zeit was the first to report on the documents.
(CNN) -- Rashid Rauf was one of al Qaeda’s most capable planners, a British citizen who operated for years in Pakistan and planned some of the terror group’s most ambitious attacks. And he wrote about them in great detail.
Rauf’s detailed analysis -- meant for al Qaeda’s senior leadership -- shows he was intimately involved in planning the devastating attack on the London transport system in 2005, and tells the inside story of the planning for that attack and another that failed just weeks later.
On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers led by Mohammed Siddique Khan, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, killed 52 people on three London subway trains and a bus. Rauf’s document describes how he recruited both Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, the two senior members of the conspiracy. He arranged explosives training for them in the tribal areas of Pakistan and communicated with them extensively in the months leading up to the attacks.
Rauf described how in order to throw the intelligence services off their scent, Siddique Khan and Tanweer pretended to be “un-Islamic” -- going to the cinema and joking loudly to each other.
Rauf wrote that after leaving Islamabad, where he had housed them for a while, he travelled with the duo to the tribal areas to meet with a senior al Qaeda operative he called “Haji.” U.S. intelligence believes this was Abu Ubaidah al Masri, then a leading member of al Qaeda’s external operations unit, who died in late 2007.
“He would guide us throughout,” Rauf wrote. “His experience in Europe and technical knowledge of explosives was important to the operation.” According to Rauf, meeting with Haji had a “profound effect on the brothers.” It took Haji just a few days to persuade the duo to conduct a suicide bombing in the UK.
Rauf wrote that Haji arranged for a trainer called Marwan Suri to provide bomb-making training using hexamine peroxide detonators and hydrogen peroxide. Siddique Khan and Tanweer test-detonated a 300-gram hydrogen peroxide mixture in the tribal areas. “Siddique was always saying to me I hope these mixtures are as good as you say they are. After he tested the mixtures he was very happy,” Rauf wrote.
Rauf wrote that he himself supervised the recording of the duo’s martyrdom tape in a house in Islamabad they were renting after their training. Rauf recalled being annoyed because there was no natural light. The duo were reluctant to make the recordings because they were shy but had agreed because Haji had ordered them to.
Rauf said that the three potential targets given to them were the Bank of England, the upcoming G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, scheduled for July 6-8, 2005, or the London Underground. Rauf agreed on a series of code words for future communication with Siddique Khan. The two bombers were instructed not to do anything for three weeks after returning to Britain, in case British intelligence was suspicious about their trip to Pakistan.
Rauf described how the duo then began purchasing bomb components, including hydrogen peroxide in gardening stores, hexamine in camping stove fuel and citric acid, which was easily available. Rauf described communicating with Siddique Khan through e-mails, phone calls and, most usefully, Yahoo Messenger.
British authorities established after the attack that Siddique Khan, Tanweer and two suicide bombers they had recruited in the UK -- Germaine Lindsey and Hasib Hussain -- traveled to London in June 2005 to conduct surveillance of targets. Rauf wrote that after conducting the surveillance, it was decided to attack trains at four London Underground stations.
Shortly before the attack, Siddique Khan began to boil down hydrogen peroxide to turn into explosives in an apartment in Leeds. But he told Rauf he was unsure he had reduced it to the correct strength. Rauf wrote that he provided Siddique Khan with technical guidance to ensure he got the bomb mixture right.
When the bombers travelled to London on the morning of July 7, 2005, they were instructed to leave the tops off the containers containing their explosives to prevent their overheating. As a further precaution, they stored the bombs in breathable Gore-Tex bags. “With the blessings of Allah I think it rained on the day of the attacks which means the weather was cooler,” wrote Rauf.
Just before 8:50 a.m., three of the suicide bombers detonated their devices on subway trains. The fourth bomber -- Hasib Hussain -- was delayed and arrived at King’s Cross subway station to find it closed. He then went to a McDonald’s before detonating his device on a bus. Rauf wrote that from the media accounts, he concluded that in the McDonald’s, Hussain was checking to see if the gas had been released or not.
Rauf was far from finished with his campaign to terrorize London. He already had another team preparing to attack the transport system. On July 21 four men led by Muktar Said Ibrahim, an Eritrean immigrant to the UK, attempted to detonate bombs on public transport -- and were unsuccessful only because the main charge of their explosive devices failed to detonate.
Of the four bomb plotters, only Ibrahim traveled to Pakistan. The others were recruited by Ibrahim into the plot in the UK.
“This is confirmation that al Qaeda was behind the 7/21 plot as well -- something I don’t think was clear before,” Yassin Musharbash, the Die Zeit journalist who first reported on the documents, told CNN. Rauf’s document for the first time provides compelling evidence that the plot was planned by al Qaeda “central” in Pakistan.
Like the 7/7 duo, Ibrahim’s group was driven to tribal areas of Pakistan and introduced to Haji, the senior al Qaeda operative. But whereas Siddique Khan’s group successfully detonated a 300-gram hydrogen peroxide bomb when they were training in Pakistan, something went very wrong when Ibrahim’s group attempted to blow up two test devices. As he stood back a distance, Ibrahim saw his two friends killed by the explosion.
According to Rauf, Ibrahim had to leave Pakistan before he felt confident in making explosives from hydrogen peroxide because his visa was going to expire in a few days. Rauf blamed his lack of preparation in part on the fact Ibrahim was trained by a less methodical bomb-making instructor than the 7/7 plotters.
When the abortive attacks took place, Rauf wrote he only found out that Ibrahim was involved when his identity was revealed by the media. Rauf wrote that he regretted he had not been able to communicate with Ibrahim and pass on the same technical fixes he had provided the 7/7 plotters as they prepared their attack.
“It was their lack of technical knowledge that caused the problem,” Rauf wrote.
Documents give new details on al Qaeda’s London bombings
