|
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was born in the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar in the early 70s’. As a teenager he was under the influence of a Muslim traveling preacher - “Tabligh” - in Zanzibar.
 It is unclear how and when Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was recruited to Al Qaeda but he was the bombing expert of the 08/07/1998 attack on USA embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. According to Tanzanian authority he bought the truck that carried the bomb used in the Dar el-Salaam attack, in which 11 people died. His associates in the attack: Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, who were captured days after the attack, revealed in their investigation that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani also obtained oxygen and acetylene tanks used to enhance the force of the explosion. The days before the 08/07/1998 attack Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani stayed in a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. He left Kenya to Karachi, Pakistan on 08/06/1998, a day before the attack, with Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. In Pakistan Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani married an Uzbek Muslim wife.
In Late 2001 Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani traveled to Monrovia, Liberia in West Africa, with another suspect in the embassy bombings, a Kenyan man Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. The UK's Observer newspaper reported in 2002 that the two men allegedly ran a lucrative Al Qaeda financing operation, trading illegal "blood diamonds" for cash.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani used many nicknames and his name appears in at least seven foiled terror attacks all over the world. The last possible foiled plot, related to the Summer 2004 Alert , associated him with Adam Yahiye Gadahn and was scheduled, according to FBI, to the summer or fall of 2004.
Naeem Noor Khan arrest on 07/13/2004 and the e-mail connections from his computer led on 07/25/2004 to the arrest of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in Pakistan along with his Uzbek wife. He was handed over to the USA at the beginning of 2005.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was kept in a CIA secret prison up to 09/2006 (probably al-Jaafar prison in the Jordanian desert) and than transferred to Guantanamo Bay where he is today (06/2007). In his investigation Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani admitted delivering explosives used to blow up the US embassy in Tanzania in 08/07/1998. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani also admitted visiting an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan after the 08/07/1998 bombings, though he denied being a member of Al Qaeda.
In accordance with Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo by 02/2010 (see - Gitmo-the end), Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was transferred from Guantanamo to New York, on Tuesday 06/09/2009 to face USA federal court on terror and murder charges.
************
Read more
07/06/2007 11:28:20
|
