As the TV camera rolled Mohammed Junaid Babar’s eyes shone indignantly behind
nerdish glasses: “There is no negotiation with the Americans. I will kill
every American that I see in Afghanistan, and every American I see in
Pakistan.”
Babar was an American-born al-Qaeda terrorist, who would go on to plot
hundreds of murders. So what caused him to give three separate television
interviews that led to his own capture and imprisonment and the jailing for
life of five fellow terrorist conspirators? I’d like to know, because it was
me who filmed them.
Mohammed Junaid Babar, 31, was the world’s first al-Qaeda supergrass, and the
first US witness to testify in a UK terror trial. The star prosecution
witness in the largest and costliest terror trial in UK history. Over three
weeks he gave evidence against co-conspirators with whom he had plotted to
blow up a British shopping centre and a nightclub, poison football stadium
food, destroy the Houses of Parliament, and detonate a “dirty” nuclear bomb.
It was Britain’s biggest post-9/11 terror plot. His detailed confessions
helped to condemn his former friends to a lifetime behind bars.
The reason Babar found himself in court at all was because six years ago in
Pakistan he let me interview him – the only time that he ever appeared on
film. Those hate-filled rants, aired on CNN and worldwide, alerted the FBI
to his existence. Three years later he was arrested, charged and persuaded
to turn state witness.
I first met Babar near Islamabad shortly after the 9/11 attacks. We were
introduced by Hassan Butt, a smooth-talking university dropout from
Manchester acting as spokesmanfor al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamic movement.
Babar was a plump, talkative American with a nasal New York accent. He was
intelligent and likeable. Keen to discuss religion and global politics.
Despite his virulent antiWesternism, he once took me for a meal at KFC. I
wondered how eating in a US fast-food chain sat with his rabid loathing of
the infidel West. I soon learnt that Babar’s principles had the solidity of
the milk-shake in his hand.
In spite of his nerdiness, Babar’s sentiments were anything but comical: “My
intention is to go to Afghanistan and fight the Americans that have invaded
and attacked our Muslim brothers and sisters in Afghanistan.”
At that time such remarks seemed extraordinary. But Babar was one of the first
of a breed of young men who have come to define our century: home-grown
Islamic terrorists, radicalised in Pakistan.
Later, in Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, I met dozens more, clamouring for
global jihad in Cockney, Brummie or Yorkshire accents. One, an 18-year-old
from Dagenham named “Abdullah”, promised to kill every British soldier he
found. Another calling himself “Abdul Falam” said that he “couldn’t wait” to
kill British soldiers and claimed to have recruited hundreds of UK Muslims
for the Taleban. His real name was Kazi Rahman, 24, an East London plumber.
Last year he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to attempting to buy
sub-machine guns and missle launchers for terrorism and was jailed for nine
years.
In this secretive company, though, US citizen Babar stood out, actively
seeking the TV spotlight while friends melted away: “I will kill every
American that I see in Pakistan. I am willing to kill American soldiers if
they enter into Afghanistan,” he raged.
His own story was incredible. His mother had barely escaped from the burning
northern tower of the World Trade Centre. “She used the fire escapes because
the stair-wells were full of smoke. She said everybody was running, people
were falling all over.”
Had this experience turned him against radical Islam? Far from it – he had “no
remorse, and no loyalty with the US. My loyalty is and will forever be with
my Muslim brothers.”
Babar’s family had emigrated to New York from Lahore when he was just 2. His
was an unhappy childhood, full of bullying and racist abuse.
“There was a great deal of racism where we lived in New York,” he said. “I was
not only the only Muslim but the only nonwhite in my school at the time, and
I was ostracised. Even going out to job markets you could feel the racism.”
Babar’s Islamic grandfather had nurtured his unhappiness into a hatred of
American values. “He instilled in me the idea that your loyalty is with
Islam, your loyalty is with the Muslims not the Americans.”
He dropped out of college, taking up menial jobs. With each upheaval, his
resentment for the society in which he lived grew. He studied the teachings
of the UK-based clerics Omar Bakri Mohammed and Abu Hamza, and when war
broke out in Afghanistan post9/11 – what he called “the playing field of
jihad” – he, like many hundreds of others, had responded to the call to
arms. “I can’t stand by and live in America while my Muslims are being
bombed. My loyalty and responsibility are towards them – now it’s time to
prove my loyalty.”
Babar had even taken time to say goodbye to a friend in the US Army, telling
him: “Hopefully we won’t have to meet on the other side.”
At the time it was hard to believe that this Bunterish figure could be a
terrorist. But, in Pakistan, it seems that I had misjudged him. Shortly
after we parted he met Waheed Mahmood, 30, a Crawley-born al-Qaeda
gun-runner, and they began to scheme. Later he met Omar Khyam and Salahuddin
Amin, two of the other convicted Operation Crevice plotters.
Those were innocent times for journalists. Even as I said goodbye to Babar in
Lahore, in Karachi a US reporter named Daniel Pearl was tapping up contacts
in search of a scoop. Those contacts snatched him. In January 2002 a British
public school-educated terrorist, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, organised his
kidnapping. Pearl was later beheaded and the killing broadcast on the
internet. Babar and Sheikh later became friends. Had they met earlier this
grim fate could have been my own.
By summer 2003 the group of talkative college dropouts and idealists had
become hardened would-be terrorists. Babar organised a Taleban terror
training camp in the mountains of northern Pakistan, attended not only by
himself and his friends, but Mohammad Sidique Khan, thefuture London 7/7
Tube-bombing mastermind. He also met Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the so-called
“al-Qae-da No 3”, recently captured by the US in Iraq. By this stage Babar
was taking orders directly from al-Qaeda, and it is thought that it ordered
him to plan a UK attack.
At our final meeting, in the shadow of Islamabad’s Faisal Mosque, Babar told
me that he would never return home. “I have no intention of going back to
New York. Right now I see my life here in Pakistan and Afghanistan and I’m
here to see this conflict through.”
But then he did two extraordinary things. He fell in love with a local
Pakistani woman and got married. Soon they had a child. Then in early 2004,
for reasons that remain unclear he did return to the US, where the FBI
promptly arrested him. The authorities had been diligently tracking him
since the day our first interview had been aired.
In room 538 of the plush Embassy Suites Hotel, in Manhattan, FBI agents gave
him a choice: a lifetime in jail separated from his wife and child, or turn
supergrass against his friends. Babar agreed to cooperate. He spent a week
spilling his guts, and pleaded guilty to five counts of providing material
support to terrorists.
The authorities said that they’d never seen anyone turn state’s witness
so fast. Babar’s final words outside that mosque now seem grimly ironic: “I
see my struggle and life’s work here. Maybe I’ll miss a couple of friends
from home, but I’ve made more friends and more brothers who are involved
with me in the struggle and these people are with me for life.”
As some of those lifelong “friends” sat in the dock of Old Bailey courtroom
eight watching Babar sell them out for his own freedom, perhaps they
wondered where that lifelong commitment had gone.
It was at the Old Bailey that our own paths crossed for the last time. Babar,
surrounded by policemen and lawyers, stood in the witness box. Watching from
the press gallery, I saw how he had changed: the wispy goatee replaced by a
full beard. Puppy fat by the gauntness of a two-year incarceration. Only the
voice was the same, as high-pitched and frenetic as it had been in Pakistan.
Not once in 17 days did Babar look at the five former friends he was
condemning to a life in jail. Nor did he look at me, although he did have
one last unpleasant surprise up his sleeve. The jury watched transfixed, as
Babar’s America-hating interviews to me were played on court TV. When asked
why he did it, Babar declared that I had paid him cash to “sex up” his
remarks.
Now it was my turn to stare at the videos. This lie would make little
difference to his eventual fate, but was easily enough to destroy my career
as a broadcast journalist. Finally, after agonising moments, he changed
tack. Babar admitted that he’d tried to deceive the FBI to save his skin.
The conundrum still remains, though. Why did Babar talk to me so willingly in
the first place? It’s a question that I’ve been asking myself for more than
six years. Some suggest that he may have already been an FBI agent. If so he
was the most indiscreet “sleeper” in their history. His life sentence hardly
an incentive to future recruits.
There may be those who suspect that, like a hack in search of a kiss-and-tell
story, I somehow coerced this potential mass murderer. Certainly such
confessions are meat and drink to a broadcast journalist. But I am sure of
this much: Babar knew what he was doing. We even discussed the impact his
remarks were having, which at the time seemed to please him.
His character clearly plays a part: a victim of bullying with a sense of
perpetual injustice, combined with an attention-seeking vanity that was to
prove his undoing.
And as his eagerness to cooperate with the FBI indicates his precious
principles were as disposable as the Western cultures that he so hated.
In the end this was a case of modern information warfare that backfired
spectacularly. Babar was obsessed with the media and its perceived
antiMuslim bias: “There’s more sides to the story than just the one the
Western media is portraying,” he fumed. “They use any excuse to attack
Islam.” He saw himself as a bin Laden-esque 21st-century jihadist warrior,
using the West’s propaganda tools to his own advantage: “I try to portray
Islam not the way the media portrays it but the way it really is,” he said.
There is just one crucial difference: Osama bin Laden did not fly to New
York and enrol in a taxi school.
Not even Babar himself knows how long he will spend behind bars. He is
pencilled in as star witness for at least two more terror trials, and will
be squeezed mercilessly for information before any thought is given to his
release: such is the fate of a supergrass. Perhaps he takes solace in
knowing that his wife and daughter are safe: flown to the US after his
arrest and given new identities courtesy of the FBI’s witness-protection
scheme.
Mohammed Babar is not in al-Qaeda’s good books. Like other self publicists,
perhaps he soaks up articles about himself such as this. Although the
content may be less enjoyable from behind the bars of a US prison cell than
his comfortable home in Pakistan.
In this celebrity-driven age it seems that even some jihadists will sacrifice
their principles, and ultimately their liberty, for a few minutes of fame on
CNN.
Jon Gilbert reports for ITV News
