How Mombasa shaped blast mastermind

Around 2000, Osama bin Laden was visiting a guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when one of his aides approached a Tanzanian man who was staying there.

The aide said bin Laden had personally requested that the man, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani , become one of his bodyguards.

Ghailani accepted the offer, was given an AK-47 assault rifle, and soon joined a tight cadre of about 15 bodyguards working for bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, according to Ghailani’s recollection, as described in an FBI document.

He also became bin Laden’s cook, taking on a task that most of the other “brothers” shunned, the FBI summary quotes him as saying.

“Most of them didn’t like to cook,” Ghailani explained.

Ghailani, 36, was sentenced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan for conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property, stemming from his trial in the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. He was also acquitted of more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy.

Ghailani’s lawyers have said he was a naïve “kid” who was duped into assisting in the plot, while prosecutors have called him a terrorist with “the blood of hundreds on his hands.”

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in a ruling on Friday last week that there was sufficient evidence that Ghailani was a “knowing and willing” participant, and that he could have been convicted of all 224 murders.

Still, the jury saw only a snapshot of Ghailani’s life, focusing on the period before the attacks. It did not learn that, according to prosecutors, he ended up training with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; guarding bin Laden; meeting Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and seeing Zacarias Moussaoui; and encountering operatives who were among the 9/11 hijackers.

Like nobody’s business

A fuller story of his life, encompassing Ghailani’s childhood in Zanzibar and his association with Al Qaeda after the attacks, offers insight into how he became a trusted aide to bin Laden, and why American authorities saw him as a potential intelligence asset after his arrest in 2004.

He grew up in Zanzibar, a short ferry ride from the Tanzanian mainland, in a concrete house with a roof of corrugated iron sheets. His parents divorced, and although he lived with his mother, he had a close relationship with his father, who ran a small restaurant.

He also visited his grandfather, who lived in a nearby village and grew coconuts, cloves and other items for the local market. “He was nice to me, and easy to know,” Ghailani told a court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr Gregory B. Saathoff, who evaluated him last year.

Although Ghailani’s parents were not particularly religious, Ghailani recalled that his grandfather took him to a mosque.

His mother, Bimkubwa Said Abdalla, said in a recent interview in Zanzibar that she remembered how her son learned to read the Koran “like nobody’s business.”

Ms Abdalla, a nurse midwife by profession who works in a hospital in Zanzibar, recalled her son as a boy who studied hard and completed high school, but then fell in with the “wrong kind of people.”

Father’s death

She said his “hobbies were playing football and swimming,” adding, “I had never heard him mentioning something like Al Qaeda or bin Laden, or anything anti-American.” He was an avid reader, learned English and was interested in mathematics, physics and computers, Dr Saathoff noted.

Ghailani worked in his father’s restaurant until he was about 15, when his father died of what he said were complications of cancer and tuberculosis. The restaurant closed and the family was plunged into extreme poverty, he told Dr Saathoff.

“We are still poor and we are used to that,” his older sister, Arafa, recalled.

The father’s death “had a profound impact upon him,” Dr Saathoff wrote, adding that Mr Ghailani “became quite tearful” as he talked about going hungry but refusing to beg. “It is hard for me to ask for things,” the psychiatrist quoted Mr Ghailani as saying.

After high school, Ghailani studied electronics at a technical school in Zanzibar, and after graduating in 1996, he moved to Dar es Salaam, where he lived with a friend whose family ran a clothing store.

Seemed like heroes

Much of what is known about Ghailani’s background before the bombings, as well as his six years as a fugitive afterward, comes from court and government records that quote him extensively. One document summarises four sessions with Dr Saathoff, each conducted in the presence of Ghailani’s lawyer.

The materials also include summaries of statements Ghailani made to the FBI, first while he was being detained by the Pakistani police after his 2004 arrest; and later, in 2007, when he was at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Ghailani was not read his rights or given a lawyer before being questioned, the government has said, and the statements were not introduced against him at his trial. But the government has contended that the statements were voluntary, an assertion that the defence strongly contests.

One defence lawyer, however, declined to comment last Friday for this article, including as to whether the statements summarised in the FBI reports were accurate.

Around 1996, Ghailani began travelling to Mombasa, where he met “serious jihad types,” as he put it. They watched jihadist videos, and he attended a mosque. Some of the “brothers” who had trained in Afghanistan “seemed like heroes and he wanted to be like them,” according to one FBI report.

Feeling at times excluded because he lacked their experience, Mr Ghailani decided to pursue training so that he could be accepted by this group, a report notes.

Ghailani also “specifically stated that he wanted to learn to fight so that he could kill Jews,” the report adds.

But an attempt to travel to Afghanistan failed when he was jailed in Kenya, for using a false passport. He was eventually released after paying a fine.

A week before it was bombed

Beginning in 1997, Ghailani became involved in the embassy plot, the government has said, buying TNT that was used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam and the truck that was used to drive the bomb to the embassy.

In 2004, Ghailani acknowledged to the FBI that he was told that the embassy was the target about “a week before it was bombed,” one report shows.

Prosecutors have said that Ghailani fled to Pakistan with other operatives the day before the attacks, but that before leaving, he told lies to friends and relatives to explain his impending disappearance.

“Ahmed came to me and told me that he was going to Yemen to look for greener pastures,” his mother, Ms Abdalla, recalled of her son’s last visit.

They ate a “delicious lunch” of rice, chicken and cassava leaves, his sister Arafa said. “We chatted for a long time and he smiled throughout,” she recalled.

Fitness instructor

“I never heard about him again until when he was named as one of the wanted men,” she said.

After arriving in Karachi, Pakistan, Ghailani joined a group of Taliban who travelled in buses across the border to Kandahar. He later moved to Khost, where he attended the Farouq camp and received weapons and explosives training.

He also spent about 10 months in a front-line unit in the mountains near Kabul, the Afghan capital, before returning to the camp, where he became a fitness instructor, training more than “100 brothers,” he said. It was around then that Ghailani was recruited to be bin Laden’s bodyguard.

Ghailani said that he had many conversations with bin Laden; and he recalled seeing some of his boss’s visitors, like Ramzi Binalshibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks (whom he also met). Both men are being detained at Guantánamo.

Ghailani told the FBI that in his conversations with men who later become 9/11 hijackers, they did not discuss “anything operational.”

Ghailani said he barely survived American missile strikes on Afghanistan after the embassy bombings and after 9/11. He knew people who were killed, he told Dr Saathoff, and recalled his terror at missiles hitting around him. “There is nothing that happens now that reminds me of that,” he said.

Eventually, with bin Laden’s blessing, Ghailani became a document forger around 2001. He described how passports of “brothers” who were killed were forged so they could be reused by other operatives. One FBI report says that Ghailani became “very good with Photoshop,” and that he claimed to be Al Qaeda’s “best forger of all.”

About six months before he was captured in Pakistan in August 2004, Ghailani married, and he has a daughter, he told Dr Saathoff.

He was arrested after a 14-hour gun battle with the Pakistani authorities, in which he received a shrapnel wound.

He was detained, first in CIA custody, where he was subjected to what he called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (those statements have not been made public); and later at Guantánamo. He was moved into the civilian system in June 2009.

That October, Ms Abdalla and her daughter, Arafa, visited Ghailani at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre. Although they could not hug or shake hands, his sister said, they had a memorable encounter, full of tears and smiles. The family tries to speak with him by phone each month.

Prosecutors, in seeking a life sentence, have challenged the claim that Ghailani was a dupe, writing recently: “It is absurd to think that Al Qaeda would allow an accidental, ambivalent terrorist to operate for six years in its innermost sanctum.”

It is uncertain if Ghailani will speak at his sentencing Tuesday, but he seemed to address his role in the embassy plot, as well as his years with Al Qaeda, in his 2007 interrogation.

“All the things I did to assist bad people, I did it because I had no choice,” the 2007 report quotes him saying. But when agents asked whether he had been forced or threatened in any way, he answered, “No.”

Rather, Ghailani “said that since he was wanted by authorities, and his picture was everywhere, he had no place to go,” the report said.