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Pentagon says planner of USS Cole and U.S. Embassy bombings confesses
The Associated Press
Issue date: 3/20/07 Section: News
WASHINGTON - A Yemeni portrayed as an al-Qaida operative and a member of a terrorist family confessed to plotting the bombings of the USS Cole and two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing hundreds, according to a Pentagon transcript of a Guantanamo Bay hearing.
The transcript released Monday was the fourth from the hearings the military is holding in private for 14 "high-value" terror suspects who were kept in secret CIA prisons before they were sent to the U.S. facility in Cuba last fall.
Last week, Waleed bin Attash said he helped plan the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200, according to the transcript. He also said he helped organize the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors.
"I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives," bin Attash said when asked what his role was in the attacks. "I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation."
Also alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard at one time, bin Attash is in his late 20s and is a Yemeni who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, authorities have said. Said to be an al-Qaida operational chief, bin Attash is known as Tawfiq bin Attash or Tawfiq Attash Khallada or simply Khallad. He was captured in 2003.
U.S. intelligence documents allege that bin Attash is a "scion of a prominent terrorist family" that includes his father, Mohammed, who was close to bin Laden, and younger brother Hassan, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2004, arriving at the age of 17.
Several brothers attended al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s and two have been killed, one in a 2001 U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, the U.S. says.
Bin Attash told a March 12 hearing that he met with the man who did the embassy bombings just a few hours before the operation took place, according to the transcript released by the Defense Department
The transcript released Monday was the fourth from the hearings the military is holding in private for 14 "high-value" terror suspects who were kept in secret CIA prisons before they were sent to the U.S. facility in Cuba last fall.
Last week, Waleed bin Attash said he helped plan the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200, according to the transcript. He also said he helped organize the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors.
"I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives," bin Attash said when asked what his role was in the attacks. "I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation."
Also alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard at one time, bin Attash is in his late 20s and is a Yemeni who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, authorities have said. Said to be an al-Qaida operational chief, bin Attash is known as Tawfiq bin Attash or Tawfiq Attash Khallada or simply Khallad. He was captured in 2003.
U.S. intelligence documents allege that bin Attash is a "scion of a prominent terrorist family" that includes his father, Mohammed, who was close to bin Laden, and younger brother Hassan, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2004, arriving at the age of 17.
Several brothers attended al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s and two have been killed, one in a 2001 U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, the U.S. says.
Bin Attash told a March 12 hearing that he met with the man who did the embassy bombings just a few hours before the operation took place, according to the transcript released by the Defense Department
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