IN a small windowless cell lit by a single light bulb, Louai al-Sakka sits
isolated from the world and fellow inmates for 24 hours a day.
His concrete box is in the bowels of Kandira, a high-security F-type prison 60
miles east of Istanbul, which was built to house Turkey’s most dangerous
criminals.
The prison has been criticised by human rights groups such as Amnesty
International. The guards control everything, including the cell’s light
switch.
Sakka’s only visitor is Osman Karahan, a lawyer who shares his fervent support
for militant Islamic jihad.
Since being convicted as an Al-Qaeda bomb plotter last year, Sakka has decided
to reveal his alleged role in some of the key plots of recent years,
providing a potential insight into the unanswered questions surrounding
them. His story is also one of a globetrotting terrorist in an organisation
that is truly multinational.
He is an enigma and, despite his involvement in three terrorist outrages
involving British citizens, he is virtually unknown in this country.
By his own account he is a senior Al-Qaeda operative who was at the forefront
of the insurgency in Iraq, took part in the beheading of Briton Kenneth
Bigley and helped train the 9/11 bombers. He has been jailed in connection
with the bombing of the British consulate in Istanbul.
Certainly, the intelligence services have shown a keen interest in the
34-year-old Syrian who says he was in Iraq alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the notorious insurgent who was killed last year in a United States
air-strike.
But, as with many things in the world of Al-Qaeda, there might be smoke and
mirrors. Some experts believe that Sakka could be overstating his importance
to the group, possibly to lay a false track for western agencies
investigating his terrorist colleagues.
Over the past three weeks The Sunday Times has conducted a series of
interviews with Sakka through his lawyer. We were given a number of
documents including a memoir in Arabic of his life.
So who is the mysterious Al-Qaeda operative in the concrete cell and what do
his claims tell us about the terrorist network and his role within it?
He was travelling under the Turkish name Erkan Ozer – one of his 16 false
identities – when he was arrested in the southeastern town of Diyarbakir in
August 2005. His downfall was as a result of a nighttime explosion that
caused a fire in his apartment a week earlier. When fire-fighters reached
the blaze they found a do-it-yourself bomb factory with vats of hydrogen,
bags of aluminium powder and 6kg of plastic explosives.
Sakka had been planning to sink Israeli cruise ships off the Turkish coast
using motorised dinghies. Despite having plastic surgery to disguise his
face, he was easily identified by the Turkish authorities.
Police later discovered documents linking him to the Istanbul suicide bombings
that killed at least 27 people after trucks exploded outside the British
consulate, the HSBC bank and two synagogues. The court indictment described
him as “a senior member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organisation tasked with
special high-level missions”. It said he had met Osama Bin Laden, who had
told him to organise attacks in Turkey.
But was this all? Last week his lawyer claimed his scope was much wider. “He
was the nnumber one networker for Al-Qaeda in Europe, Iran, Turkey and
Syria,” Karahan said.
According to the documents provided by Karahan, Sakka grew up in the ancient
city of Aleppo, Syria, the son of a wealthy factory owner, and followed in
his father’s footsteps by becoming the general manager of a company that
sold one of Syria’s most popular washing-up liquids. But he was drawn to the
Islamic cause from a young age, according to his memoir.
His politics were shaped by the conflict between President Hafez al-Assad, the
former Syrian dictator, and the Muslim Brotherhood, an underground Islamic
group. When Sakka was nine, Assad quelled an uprising by the brotherhood in
the town of Hama by killing an estimated 10,000 people.
“Like any other Muslim boy he was deeply affected by these events,” says his
memoir.
When the Bosnian war opened a new front for jihadists in the early 1990s,
Sakka left his job and headed for the conflict. He stayed in Turkey
initially and established the “mujaheddin service office”, which provided
medical support for Bosnia and later the two Chechen wars.
It soon became clear that more than medical help was needed. Sakka set up
intensive physical training programmes in the Yalova mountain resort area,
near Istanbul, to prepare the scores of young men heading for the conflicts.
The memoir claims the volunteers came from Europe, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan,
the Gulf, North Africa and South America.
The Chechens needed trained fighters. Sakka was telephoned by Ibn al-Khattab,
the late militia leader controlling the foreign fighters against the
Russians. Khattab requested that Sakka’s trainees should be sent on to
Afghanistan for military training because “conditions are tough”.
This brought Sakka into contact with Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking Al-Qaeda
member, who ran a large terrorist training camp near the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sakka was later to be sentenced in ab-sentia for
involvement in the foiled Jordanian millennium bomb attacks in 2000 along
with Zubaydah.
One of Sakka’s chief roles was to organise passports and visas for the
volunteers to make their way to Afghanistan through Pakistan. His ability to
keep providing high-quality forged papers made Turkey a main hub for
Al-Qaeda movements, his lawyer says. The young men came to Turkey pretending
to be on holiday and Sakka’s false papers allowed them to “disappear”
overseas.
Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the
Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But they posed no threat
to Turkey at the time.
But a bigger plot was developing. In late 1999, Karahan says,a group of four
young Saudi students went to Turkey to prepare for fighting in Chechnya.
“They wanted to be good Muslims and join the jihad during their holidays,”
he said.
They had begun a path that was to end with the September 11 attacks on America
in 2001. They were: Ahmed and Hamza al-Ghamdi who hijacked the plane that
crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center; their companion
Saeed al-Ghamdi whose plane crashed in a Pennsylvanian field; and Nawaf
al-Hazmi who died in the Pentagon crash.
They undertook Sakka’s physical training programme in the mountains and later
were joined by two of the other would-be hijackers: Majed Moqed, who also
perished in the Pentagon crash, and Satam al-Suqami, who was in the first
plane that hit the north tower.
Moqed and Suqami had been hand-picked by Al-Qaeda leaders in Saudi Arabia
specifically for the twin towers operation, Sakka says, and were en route to
Afghanistan. Sakka persuaded the other four to go to Afghanistan after plans
to travel to Chechnya were aborted because of problems crossing the border.
“Sakka [told Zubaydah] he liked the four men and recommended them,” said
Karahan.
Before leaving, all six received intensive training together, forming a cell
led by Suqami, which was similar to the Hamburg group run by Mohammed Atta,
another ringleader in the 9/11 attacks.
At one point, Sakka claims the entire group were arrested by police in Yalova
after their presence raised suspicions. They were interrogated for a day but
eventually released because there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
Some of Sakka’s account is corroborated by the US government’s 9/11
Commission. It
found evidence that four of the hijackers – whom Sakka says he trained – had
initially intended to go to Chechnya from Turkey but the border into Georgia
was closed. Sakka had prepared fake visas for the group’s travel to Pakistan
and arranged their flights from Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. The group of
four went to the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar and the other two to Khaldan,
near Kabul, an elite camp for Al-Qaeda fighters.
When Moqed and Suqami returned to Turkey, Sakka employed his skills as a
forger to scrub out the Pakistani visa stamps from their passports. This
would help the Arab men enter the United States without attracting suspicion
that they had been to a training camp.
Sakka’s lawyer said: “Just like there is money laundering, there is also
terrorist laundering and Turkey was the centre of this.”
According to Sakka, Nawaf al-Hazmi was a veteran operative who went on to
pilot the plane that hit the Pentagon. Although this is at odds with the
official account, which says the plane was flown by another hijacker, it is
plausible and might answer one of the mysteries of 9/11.
The Pentagon plane performed a complex spiral dive into its target. Yet the
pilot attributed with flying the plane “could not fly at all” according to
his flight instructors in America. Hazmi, on the other hand, had mixed
reviews from his instructors but they did remark on how “adept” he was on
his first flight.
Paul Thompson, author and 9/11 researcher, said Sakka’s account was credible.
“I think there is a lot more about the history of the hijackers that needs
to be found out and Sakka’s claim may resume the debate about just how much
was known about them before 9/11,” he said.
Sakka’s mountain trainees, meanwhile, had spread out to a number of countries
where they carried out terrorist attacks. He claims this is why he was
charged with a string of crimes committed by his associates. He was given a
15-year sentence in Jordan for the millennium bomb attacks, the death
penalty for an an assassination attempt on Syria’s military intelligence
chief and has been charged in Saudi Arabia for an explosives plot.
In effect, he had become a free-lance operative aiding a series of groups
without necessarily agreeing with their targets. His links with Al-Qaeda,
however, remained strong after the 9/11 attacks.
His lawyer says the Al-Qaeda leadership valued a number of his skills. “But
most important,” he added, “was that Sakka was incredibly secretive.
Al-Qaeda tested him many times, but he never once revealed a secret.”
The US invasion of Afghani-stan in late 2001 threw many of the Al-Qaeda camps
into disarray. Many of the group’s fighters are thought to have fled across
the border to seek safety in Iran.
According to Sakka’s account, one of those fighters was Zar-qawi. The precise
movements of the Jordanian, who is thought to have been wounded fighting
alongside the Taliban in Afghani-stan, have always been a matter of
speculation.
Sakka’s initial role in the insurgency was to help foreign fighters enter
Iraq. He took his family to live in Falluja, which was emerging as the hub
of the foreign fighters’ resistance to the occupying forces.
He later told a court: “We held out for 70 days. They destroyed vast quarters
of the city. It wouldn’t have been possible for them to enter before doing
so. We ran out of ammunition and had to pull out.”
A month before the fall of Falluja, Sakka claims that he was part of the group
that killed Kenneth Bigley, the British hostage. He describes himself as the
“diplomat” who negotiated on behalf of the insurgents and says he presided
over the court that resolved to execute him. He says Bigley’s body is buried
in Falluja with his passport and confession video.
Today Sakka remains a controversial figure. The British Foreign Office says it
has interviewed Sakka in jail about the Bigley murder. He provided a map of
where Bigley was buried but the Foreign Office says they could not find the
body. In Turkey, police sources claim Sakka may have become clinically
insane or perhaps be an egoma-niac who has overstated his role.
The Sunday Times has spoken to a number of Al-Qaeda experts who say that many
elements of his story ring true, but they are impossible to verify
conclusively. Evan Kohlmann, an investigator for the 9/11 Finding Answers
Foundation, said: “When [Sakka] was in Falluja there were several
high-ranking Turkish guys there. It is also true that for a number of
conflicts that Al-Qaeda has been involved in, Turkey is a very important
through stop and a lot of fighters have travelled through there with the
assistance of local people.”
Swift justice
Gordon Brown’s plans to double the detention period for terror suspects face
further opposition with a report showing that America needs just 48 hours to
file charges in Al-Qaeda cases.
The report by Justice, the human rights group, will say this week that Brown’s
plans to extend precharge detention to 56 days are untenable.
It says: “No western democracy faces a greater threat of terrorism than the
US. Despite this, the proven ability of US law enforcement to charge
suspects in complex terror plots within 48 hours of arrest without resort to
exceptional measures shows that UK proposals to extend precharge detention
are both unjustified and unnecessary.”
The report emphasises the importance of FBI phone tap evidence and Brown is
considering whether such intercept evidence should be allowed in Britain.
Eric Metcalfe, the Justice report’s author, said: “From Guantanamo Bay to
rendition to torture, the US has done a lot of things badly wrong in the
fight against terrorism.
“But in the rush to extend precharge detention here in the UK, we sometimes
overlook what they are doing right.”
