Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
youngster made a splendid prospect for recruitment. Although his
family background could hardly be called Islamist, Naeem was greatly
influenced by radical causes from Palestine to Bosnia and Chechnya.
His father worked as a senior purser for Pakistan International Airlines
and his mother was a Botany lecturer at St Joseph’s College for Women
in Karachi, run by the Roman Catholic Church. The impressionable
teenager soon met with other al-Qaeda members, who welcomed him
into their midst. In 1998, he was dispatched to Afghanistan to attend
a three-month commando training course at bin Laden’s Al-Farooq
camp in Khost. 49
Returning to Pakistan, Naeem, who was also known as Abu Talha,
set up a small communications centre in Lahore, which turned into
a major al-Qaeda network after the collapse of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan. Naeem became the bridge between al-Qaeda leaders
and their operatives. From his communications centre, he relayed
coded messages on the Internet from the al-Qaeda leadership, hiding
in caves in tribal areas, to their operatives abroad. He would also send
emails directly to the cells, not only in the USA and Britain, but also in
terrorist crossroads like Malaysia and Indonesia. Naeem, a close ally
of the KSM clan, also worked in conjunction with Aruchi in cultivating
al-Qaeda cells in Europe and elsewhere. 50
Naeem had other important tasks as well. He handled operative
reports and recommendations and, together with his own observations,
sent them via courier to the terrorist leadership sheltering in Waziristan’s
mountainous region. He had made at least five trips to Britain over the
previous six years, including a brief stint at City University in London.
He also collected intelligence to plan terrorist attacks on important
installations in Britain. Investigators recovered maps and detailed plans
for an attack on Heathrow airport. One of Naeem’s cousins, Ahmed
Babar, had been working on the terrorist plan in close association
with Dhiron Bharot, alias Essa al-Hindi, the head of al-Qaeda’s cell in
London. The information recovered from Naeem’s computer led to the
arrest of al-Hindi and some other operatives by the British police. 51
The capture of the man who worked as bin Laden’s back channel
exposed an intricate web of al-Qaeda contacts in Pakistan, Britain
and the USA. Information received during his interrogation helped
not only to break al-Qaeda’s cell in Britain, but also in tracking down
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian national indicted for murder in
connection with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa.
Pakistani security forces captured the man, who had a $25 million