LeT: An Al Qaeda Clone

In a conversation with the editorial staff of the Washington Post on June 26, 2003, PresidentGeneral Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was reported to have claimed that he had effectively put an end to theterrorist activities of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), both members of Osama binLaden's International Islamic Front (IIF), in Pakistan.

He was quoted as having told the newspaper's staff as follows:

"The Lashkar-e-Toiba has been banned. The Jaish-e-Mohammad has been banned.  There are hundredsof offices out there and I mean hundreds and hundreds of offices around the country, including Kashmir, havebeen sealed and closed.  Their accounts have been frozen.  Nobody before this could have touchedthem.  They couldn't even have touched anyone of these organisations or their leaders."

The next day, as if to prove him wrong, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) charged seven men in theWashington area and an eighth in Philadelphia with stockpiling weapons and conspiring to wage"jihad" against India in support of a terrorist group in Kashmir.  The FBI's charge-sheetagainst them described them as members of the LET.  It also said that three others involved in the casewere absconding and were believed to be in Saudi Arabia.

Although the FBI officials said that there was no evidence of a plot against the US, the members of thegroup had  pledged support for pro-Muslim violence overseas, hoarded high-powered rifles and receivedmilitary training in Pakistan. Nine of the 11 accused are American citizens, and three had served in the USarmed forces for some time in the past.  The charge-sheet said that seven members of the group hadtravelled to Pakistan in the last several years, and some received military training in small arms, machineguns, grenade launchers and other weaponry at a camp in northeast Pakistan connected to the LET.

The 41-count charge-sheet, or  indictment as it is called in the USA, charged the 11 accused withconspiracy, firearms violations and plotting against a friendly nation — namely, India. US officialsconnected with the investigation were quoted by the media as saying that there was no evidence that theaccused were considering an attack within the United States or had ties to Al Qaeda.  And officials werecareful not to describe the group as a "sleeper cell" — a term used to characterize suspectedterrorist supporters in Lackawanna, N.Y., Seattle and elsewhere arrested last year, some of whom wereconnected with the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) of Pakistan.

However, the officials charged that the men conspired to help Muslims abroad in violent jihad not only inIndia, but also in Chechnya, the Philippines and other countries. The men, the charge-sheet said, obtainedAK-47s and other high-powered weaponry and practised small-unit military tactics in
Virginia.

The indictment charged that the accused pledged their willingness to die as martyrs in support of theMuslim cause and gathered in private homes and at an Islamic center in suburban Washington to hear lectures"on the righteousness of jihad" in Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere. They also watched videotapesshowing Muslim fighters engaged in jihad.  They had also organised a function to  celebrate the crashing  of the space shuttle Columbia.  One of the astronauts killed in the crash was ofIndian origin.  A message read out on the occasion had described the USA "as the greatest enemy ofthe Muslims."

According to the indictment, one of the accused Masoud Ahmed Khan, a Maryland resident, had a documenttitled "The Terrorist's Handbook," with instructions on how to manufacture and use explosives andchemicals as weapons, as well as a photograph of F.B.I. headquarters in Washington.  He is since reportedto have been ordered to be released on bail by the court keeping in view his past good record in hiscommunity. The FBI has appealed against it.

At least two of the 11 accused have been described as of  Pakistani origin. One of them, Mohammed Aatique, 30, is a work (H-1) visa holder while Khawja Mahmood Hasan, 27, is a naturalized US citizenborn in Pakistan.  But at least one more suspect, Masoud Ahmad Khan, 31, also has a Pakistani soundingname although his nationality was not disclosed. The other accused are Randall Todd Royer, 30; Ibrahim Ahmedal-Hamdi, a Yemeni national and non-resident alien; Yong Ki Kwon, 27, a naturalized US citizen born in Korea;Seifullah Chapman, 30; Hammad Abdur-Raheem, 35; Donald Thomas Surratt, 30; Caliph Basha Ibn Abdur-Raheem,29,and Sabri Benkhala, 28. Chapman, Hasan and Benkhala are believed to be living in Saudi Arabia.

When an embarrassed Musharraf was asked about it at Los Angeles the next day, he was reported to have said:"We need to see who they are, where they were trained and how they were organised."

Earlier, on June 20, 2003 before the arrival of Musharraf in the US for his Camp David meeting withPresident George Bush, FBI officials had disclosed that they had arrested in April Iyman Faris, also known asMohammad Rauf, originally a resident of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), who had migrated to the US in 1994and was working as a truck driver in Ohio and charged him with having links with Al Qaeda and Khalid SheikhMohammad, said to be Osama bin Laden's operations chief, who is believed to have co-ordinated the terroriststrikes of September 11, 2001, in the US.  Khalid was arrested in the house of a women's wing leader ofthe Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan at Rawalpindi in March by the Pakistani authorities and handed over tothe FBI.

According to FBI officials, as quoted in the US media, Faris had visited Afghanistan and Pakistan a numberof times between 2000 and 2002, met  Osama bin Laden and worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, inorganising and financing jihad causes.  After returning to the US from Pakistan in late 2002, officialssaid, he began examining the Brooklyn Bridge and discussing via coded messages with Al Qaeda leaders inPakistan ways of using blow torches to sever the suspension cables.

"The plotting continued through March, as Faris sent coded messages to operatives in Pakistan. Onesuch message said that the "weather is too hot. "

FBI officials have been quoted as saying  that meant that Faris feared the plot was unlikely tosucceed -- apparently because of security and the bridge's structure-- and should be postponed.  He wasarrested soon thereafter.  According to media reports, the interrogation of Khalid led the FBI to Faris.

It is reported that while there is no evidence so far to connect Faris with the other 11 accused belongingto the LET, the FBI is looking into this possibility.  Sources in Pakistan describe Faris,aged 34, as aPunjabi ex-serviceman settled in POK, before he migrated to the US.  It is said that he was associated inthe past with the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), an anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu terrorist organisation of Pakistan,which is reported to have a large network in the US, Canada and the Caribbean.  It was involved in anumber of violent incidents against Jewish and Hindu interests in the US in the early 1990s and its activitieswere cited in the annual reports of the US State Department titled "Patterns of Global Terrorism".

Last year, Pakistani Police officers had alleged that Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, had gone to Pakistanfrom Mumbai in India to enquire into the possible links of the JUF with the shoe bomber who had unsuccessfullytried to cause an explosion in a US aircraft flying from France to the USA.  Pearl was trapped by a jointgroup of terrorists from different Pakistani organisations belonging to bin Laden's International IslamicFront (IIF), kidnapped and murdered.

The belated discovery by the FBI of secret cells of these Pakistani organisations in the USA should not bea matter for surprise. Since 1995, reports had been coming from Pakistan about the planned infiltration oftrained cadres of Pakistani organisations such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM)and  the TJ to the USA inorder to carry their jihad to the US territory. The HUM not only infiltrated its cadres into the US, but alsobrought some Afro-American Muslims to Pakistan for being trained in its camps there.

Amongst the organisations in the USA with which the TJ was believed to be closely associated were theIslamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA).  The President ofthe ISNA used to be one Sheikh Abdullah Idris Ali, an American immigrant of Sudanese origin, who was also thePesh Imam and Khatib of a mosque in New York.

The annual convention of the ISNA held at Columbus, Ohio, in September 1995, was addressed, amongst others,by Mr. Hamza Yusuf, an American citizen of Greek origin, who, after embracing Islam, had lived for six yearsin Mauritania to study Islam and then work as a TJ preacher, Mr. Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens,the famous pop singer, who embraced Islam after coming into contact with the TJ in Pakistan, Dr. Saghir ofAlgeria, and Dr.Israr Ahmed, the Amir of the Tanzeem Islami of Pakistan and a worker of the TJ.

Addressing the convention, Dr. Israr Ahmed said: "The process of the revival of Islam in differentparts of the world is real.  A final show-down between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world, whichhas been captured by the Jews, would soon take place.  The Gulf war was just a rehearsal for the comingconflict.  " He appealed to the Muslims of the world, including those in the USA, to preparethemselves for the coming conflict.

The convention was told that the ISNA had a US $ 100 million budget for spreading Islamic education in theUS through the publication of text-books, setting-up of week-end Islamic schools and a weekly cable TVprogramme called "Onsight" which would be available in all the States of the US.

The TJ operates in the US and the Caribbean directly through its own preachers deputed from Pakistan andalso recruited from the Pakistani immigrant community in the US as well as through front organisations such asthe Jamaat-ul-Fuqra. In its preachings to the Pakistani immigrants in the US, the TJ has been stressing theimportance of cultivating the Afro-American Muslims in order to counter the lobbying power of the Hindus andthe Jewish people.

Writing in the Dawn of January 12,1996,  Ghani Eirabie, believed close to the TJ, said:

"The Ummah must remember that winning over the black Muslims is not only a religious obligation, butalso a selfish necessity.   The votes of the black Muslims can give the immigrant Muslims the politicalclout they need at every stage to protect their vital interests. Likewise, outside Muslim states like SaudiArabia, Malaysia and Pakistan need to mobilise their effort, money and missionary skills to expand andconsolidate the black Muslim community in the USA, not only for religious reasons, but also as a far-sightedinvestment in the black Muslims' immense potential as a credible lobby for Muslim causes, such as Palestine,Bosnia or Kashmir--offsetting, at least partially, the venal influence of the powerful India-Israellobby."

Eirabie wanted the US Muslim community to prepare itself for the day in the second decade of the newmillennium when, according to him, the Muslims would emerge as the second largest religious group in the USafter the Christians.

The Friday Times, the prestigious weekly of Lahore, reported in its issue for February 1 to 7, 2002,as follows::

"Sources say that when Dawatul Irshad (Markaz Dawa Al Irshad since re-named as Jamaat ud-Dawa), parent organisation of the now banned Lashkar Tayyaba (Lashkar-e-Toiba), shifted its activities to Azad Kashmir (POK),it took with it many non-Pakistanis suspected of links to Al Qaeda.   All these organisations wereloosely affiliated and their activists moved across organisations and cells with a great degree of ease, anintelligence source said."

The "Friday Times" added:

" Just before the Musharraf Government took action against the organisation, there were quite a fewforeigners residing at Dawa's headquarters in Muridke.  Most of these people had infiltrated intoPakistan in the initial stages of the war, says an insider.  Some of these people shifted along withother Lashkar cadres to Azad Kashmir (POK) after Hafiz Mohammed Saeed (its Amir)resigned under pressure fromthe Government.  After his resignation, he also constituted another jehadi group called Jamaat ud-Dawawhile the supreme council nominated Abdul Wahid Kashmiri, another senior member of the Dawatul Irshad, as itsnew Amir.   Insiders say some of these foreigners are also said to be linked to Hezbul Tehreer andwork under the supervision of Abdul Qadeem Zaloom, a Saudi-based person with links to the Al Qaeda."

25. In a paper on  theLET and Al Qaeda , I had mentioned as follows:

"In the past, the LET had kept its activities confined to its jihad in India and its assistance to theJemmah Islamiyah and other pro-bin Laden elements in Indonesia. It did not utter any threats against the USAor target American nationals or interests.  As a result, American intelligence officials based inPakistan did not pay the same attention to monitoring its activities as they did to the activities of Al Qaedaand other Pakistani organisations , despite the fact that Abu Zubaidah, then No. 3 in Al Qaeda, was arrestedin March last year from the house of an LET leader at Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab.

"It has thus managed to retain its infrastructure and source of funding intact.   Though it haschanged its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa to escape the consequences of the order banning it issued by Gen.PervezMusharraf on January 15,2002, it continues to be referred to by many Afghans, Pakistanis and Arabs as the LET.Since  the beginning of this year (2003), it has been trying to perform the role previously played by AlQaeda as the co-ordinator of pro-bin Laden networks all over the world, as the supplier of funds to thenetworks in different countries and particularly in South-East Asia and of suicide volunteers, arms andammunition and explosives to the surviving Al Qaeda  operatives in Pakistan etc.

"It has reportedly re-organised its structure on the pattern of Al Qaeda and has vastly expanded itsactivities to the business field in order to augment its sources of income. The "Friday Times"(January 17-23), the prestigious weekly of Lahore, reported as follows: "The Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JD),formerly known as Lashkar-e-Toiba, is snapping up properties across Pakistan.  Sources told the weeklythat recent real estate purchases by the JD amount  to about Rs.300 million. It has reportedly boughtfour plots of land in Hyderabad division (of Sindh) and six others in various Sindh districts. The total pricetag is about Rs.200 million.  Recent purchases in Lahore have cost it Rs.100 million."

"During the recent Eid festival in Pakistan, it was reported to have received charity contributionsworth Rs. 710 million, mostly in the form of the hides of the sacrificed animals. It has also been in receiptof large funds from overseas Pakistanis," the Friday Times said..

As stated in my above-mentioned article, Al Qaeda has been trying to use the organisational infrastructureof the LET in Pakistan, its  network in the Islamic world and its large funds for stepping up acts ofterrorism against the USA and Israel. The LET's close access to senior officers of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment could be exploited by Al Qaeda to prevent any action against its surviving cadresin Pakistan. Many members of Pakistan's scientific community in the nuclear and missile fields regularlyattend the conventions of the LET. By making use of this, Al Qaeda should be able to seek the assistance ofLET sympathisers in the scientific community for acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Waleed bin Atash, the Al Qaeda suspect in the case relating to the attack on the the US ship USS Cole atAden in October, 2000, who was arrested by the Pakistani authorities on April 29 last and handed over to theFBI, is reported to have told the Pakistani authorities during the interrogation that last year about 75 Araboperatives of Al Qaeda had fled from Afghanistan and the bordering areas of Pakistan and taken shelter atdifferent places in Karachi.  According to him, of these, about 50 were still in hiding in Karachi. However, he denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of bin Laden. He is also reported to have stated that heand his associates were recruiting Pakistani volunteers for undertaking suicide missions against Americantargets and that they had already recruited 12  from the LET.

In another article of May 14 titled TheTerrorism Triangle  I had stated as follows: