SLEEPY Charleston, the South Carolina hometown of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, seems an unlikely place to be on the front line of the global war on terror.

Yet on the third floor of a glass office building overlooking the Cooper river is a locked room that is straight out of a futuristic thriller.

Inside, a series of control panels with flashing lights and whirring hard drives comprise the master computer of the world’s largest free-standing database of intelligence on Islamic terrorism. It could hold the key to dismantling Al-Qaeda.

“It’s the best database on Islamic terrorism in the world,” said a senior counter-terrorism official at the FBI.

The database is the pivotal tool in what those involved say will be the biggest class action in history: a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the families of 1,431 of the people killed on 9/11 and 1,325 of the injured.

More than 100 of the clients are British. Yet while investigators building up the database have received government help in 19 countries, from Afghanistan to Syria, they have had none in Britain, according to Ron Motley, the lawyer behind the action.

“We’ve had zero co-operation from the UK,” said Motley, who works from an enormous yacht named Themis after the Greek goddess of justice. “They just don’t want to help their own citizens.”

Among the millions of pages of documents collated elsewhere are the Jordanian intelligence records on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America’s most wanted man in Iraq; Bosnian intelligence files of the minutes of the meeting to form Al-Qaeda; German prosecution reports on the Hamburg cell that spawned many of the key players of the September 11 attacks; and Spanish documents that show links between 9/11 and the 2004 Madrid bombings.

There are also records from the Philippines on the failed 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up 12 American airliners over the Pacific, the forerunner of 9/11; Moroccan intelligence on the 2003 Casablanca bombings and Moroccan members of the Hamburg cell; Russian files on Chechnya; and the Swiss bank records of Osama Bin Laden.

I first got an idea of the scale of the operation last year when I ran into two Americans in the home of an Afghan warlord. The sunglasses and bulging briefcases made me think CIA. But it emerged that they were a retired FBI agent and a former special forces officer, working as investigators for Motley.

I was the first journalist to be granted access to the database. Down a series of oak-panelled corridors in Motley’s law office is a darkened room where two database managers sit at laptops in front of a large screen. They showed me how they have adapted a British computer program called Analysts’ Notebook — used by many law enforcement agencies — to find links between some of America’s most wanted terrorists, well known Islamic charities and famous banks.

We typed in “Abdelghani Mzoudi”, one of the Moroccans from the Hamburg cell who, the German authorities believe, was involved in logistics for 9/11. We added “account” and the computer flashed up six accounts. We followed payments to his Citibank account in Düsseldorf and found that his fellow Moroccan, Zakariya Essabar, was the source of one of the transactions. Soon there was a web of bank transactions on screen, linking the two men.

Mzoudi was acquitted last year by a German court that said there was a significant possibility he knew nothing of the plot. German prosecutors are appealing.

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