America’s chief suspect for yesterday’s attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon is Osama bin Laden, one of America’s ten most
wanted men. He carries a $5 million bounty on his head.

Bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he and his followers would carry
out an unprecedented attack on US interests for its support of Israel,
an Arab journalist with access to him said yesterday.

Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, an
Arabic-language weekly news magazine, said Islamic fundamentalists led
by Bin Laden were “almost certainly” behind yesterday’s attack on the
United States.

“It is most likely the work of Islamic fundamentalists. Osama bin Laden
warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an
unprecedented attack, a very big one. Personally, we received
information that he planned very, very big attacks against American
interests. We received several warnings like this.”

The US government, which appears to have suffered a catastrophic
intelligence lapse, said last night it believed bin Laden was
responsible. Soon afterwards, there were reports of air raids in
Afghanistan, his headquarters, though the US was initially denying
responsibility.

One of bin Laden’s associates was to be sentenced today over the 1998
bombing of a US embassy in Tanzania that killed 213 people. The
sentencing had been set for a federal court near the World Trade Centre.

From his several mountain hide-outs in southern Afghanistan, Bin Laden,
a Saudi millionaire, runs Al Qaeda, one of the world’s most feared
terrorist organisations. He is perhaps the only one sophisticated enough
to arrange yesterday’s stunning timetabled destruction.

Bin Laden is wanted by a US court for masterminding the bombing in 1998
of two US embassies in East Africa in which 224 people died. According
to the indictment, his organisation is “dedicated to opposing
non-Islamic governments with force and violence”.

In August 1996, after he moved to Afghanistan, he issued a “declaration
of war” against the United States, because of its position as a secular
superpower and because of the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this year, George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, described him as the most immediate and serious threat to US
security.

Born in Jeddah in 1955, Bin Laden is the son of a construction magnate.
He used his inherited wealth in the 1980s to run the “Services Office”
which funnelled fighters and money into Afghanistan for the war against
the Soviet occupation.

Now, long after the Soviets left, he remains in Afghanistan and sends
money and fighters to support the Taleban, the hardline Islamic regime
which is trying to create a pure but brutal Islamic state.

He is believed to be responsible for an attempted assassination attack
on Sunday against Ahmad Shah Masood, Afghanistan’s most senior
opposition commander and the only force still resisting the Taleban.

Taleban leaders have refused to hand Bin Laden over for trial, but they
insist he cannot command an international terrorist organisation from
his hide-outs. He was photographed in January, posing at the wedding of
his son, Mohammed, in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, in an apparent
gesture of defiance to the United States.

“Osama bin Laden came as a mujahid (a holy warrior),” Maulvi Qudratullah
Jamal, the Taleban information minister, said last month.

Like all senior Taleban ministers, Mr Jamal has met the Saudi. “He is a
very calm man and he respects Islamic law. He is good man and he doesn’t
want to harm anyone.”

Few Western analysts believe that. Al Qaeda is an advanced,
international organisation run on a system of cells. Last year, US
intelligence agencies found CD-ROM copies of a six-volume training
manual apparently used by Bin Laden to train recruits. The manual
contained information on recruiting followers and assembling bombs.

Bin Laden’s reach is extensive. According to the indictment for the US
embassy bombings, he is suspected of involvement in the killing of 18 US
soldiers in Mogadishu, in Somalia, in October 1993. He provided a safe
house for Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Centre in 1993,
killing six people and injuring 1,000.

He is also believed to have tried to obtain components of nuclear and
chemical weapons. But it is not clear how extensive his weaponry is now.
The Pentagon said a year ago that with the nerve gases tabun and sarin
at his disposal, he might attempt to leave the realm of brutal terrorist
to become a potential world power broker.

With the Middle East in flames and teetering on the edge of war, there
are three factors making now the right time for any attack by Bin Laden.

The peace process is in ruins and the Arab world is convinced that it
cannot come back. For the first time in years, despite the brutal
lynching of Israeli soldiers, the shooting of settlers and the suicide
bomb attacks, the Palestinians have garnered a large measure of world
sympathy. With their enemies shooting children dead in the streets for
throwing stones, Israel has been losing the public relations battle with
its foes and Bin Laden is offering his fanatics a glory in death that
has evaded them in life.

The CIA sent an urgent report to the Clinton administration 18 months
ago that suicide bombers inside Israel with chemical weapon bombs could
wreak death and destruction on a massive scale. The Japanese cult that
released a small portion of sarin into the Tokyo subway system a few
years ago showed its awesome power.

The United States targeted what it said was a chemical weapons plant in
Sudan in retaliation for the bombings of US embassies in Africa that Bin
Laden carried out with lethal effect.

“But the chemicals had already gone,” said Kenneth Katzman of the US
Congressional Research Service and an expert on Middle East terrorism.
He said they had been shipped back to the terrorist training academy Bin
Laden runs in Afghanistan where they were believed to have been
“weaponised”.

Weaponising consists of turning inert chemical agents into lethal toxins
and fitting them into devices to spread the poison over a wide scale. A
teacup full of sarin in the water supply of Jerusalem would be enough to
kill every inhabitant ten times over.

The normal method of dispersing chemical agents is through an artillery
shell, but because Palestinian stone-throwers don’t possess artillery
pieces, the accepted future scenario is of an infiltration into Israel
of suicide bombers.

“Aside from the fact that he has access to millions of dollars," said a
former CIA counter-terrorism chief, Vincent Cannistrano, “Bin Laden and
his people are masters of improvisation. With his connections in Saudi
Arabia, where his father became one of the country’s richest men as a
builder, and to other areas of the Arab world, he has access to some of
the most sophisticated explosives and weapons. Semtex, nitro-glycerine,
detonators.

“By the best estimates, he probably has no more than two pounds of tabun
and sarin,” said Günther Griese, a German anti-terrorist expert. “No
matter – that is enough to wipe out Israel, Egypt, Jordan and probably
several other countries besides.”

It is ironic that Bin Laden was once backed by the United States, a
warlord who disciplined and organised Muslim youth in Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan. Now he is Washington’s most wanted man.

Mr Cannistrano said: “He is the only one out of any of the Middle East
terrorist groups who has declared a fatwa against America. He is the one
with the vision and the means to see this thing through.”

Around 2,000 Muslims have “graduated” from his terror academy over the
past five years. Bin Laden also has links with other international
terrorist organisations. He has developed close relations with Ayman
al-Zawahiri, the head of a leading faction of the Egyptian extremist
group al-Jihad, who has also sought sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Washington has tried to strike back but with limited success. Listening
stations operated by the US National Security Agency in countries around
Afghanistan are able to trace e-mail, fax and satellite calls.

The US launched 60 cruise missiles at his training camps in Khost, in
southern Afghanistan, shortly after the bombings of the US embassies in
Africa, homing in on the transmissions from one of his Inmarsat cellular
phones. Minutes before, Bin Laden escaped, suspecting a raid was
planned.


HIJACKERS: THE SUSPECTS

US INTELLIGENCE agencies will be concentrating their efforts on four
lines of inquiry until hard evidence turns up:

OSAMA BIN LADEN

The Saudi Arabian former businessman with a pathological hatred of all
things American must be the prime suspect for yesterday’s terrorist
attack.

He has a track record of striking US targets in the Middle East, Africa
and New York. His Afghanistan-based Islamic fundamentalist group
undoubtedly has the motivation to mount this type of attack, but its
sheer scale and audacity is far beyond anything he has tried before.

PALESTINIAN GROUPS

The suicide element of the hijackings would seem to have the
fingerprints of fanatical Palestinian groups with Islamic fundamentalist
links such as Islamic Jihad, the Hezbollah or others.

The year-old conflict in the occupied territories has radicalised a new
generation of Palestinian youth who are determined to strike back at
Israel’s chief paymaster and arms supplier.

MIDDLE EASTERN GOVERNMENT/ INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

The complex nature of the simultaneous multiple hi-jackings of the
aircraft perhaps points to the involvement of Middle Eastern
intelligence agencies.

They could have provided the logistics and cloak of secrecy necessary to
get the hijack teams into the US and on to the aircraft without
detection.

Elements in the Iranian, Iraqi and Libyan regimes have strong anti-US
track records and might want to provoke an overwhelming response from
the Bush administration in the hope of radicalising their populations to
continue the struggle against the "great Satan".

US RIGHT-WING GROUPS

Although groups with Middle Eastern links must be top of the US
government’s suspects list, the possibility of involvement by so-called
militia groups cannot be discounted. They have the motivation and
resources to continue their struggle against the federal government by
very violent means, as the Oklahoma bombing proved