Kingpin spent years in flight, FBI says
Abu Anas al-Liby, the al-Qaeda lieutenant seized in Tripoli, was released from questioning by police in Manchester, U.K., and has spent the past 14 years on the run after fleeing his home in Britain, according to a former FBI official.
Abu Anas, 49, was given political asylum in Britain in 1995 after being thrown out of al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Sudan by Osama bin Laden in response to a request from the Sudanese government.
Sudan was under pressure from Muammar Gaddafi, then Libya’s president, to stop harbouring Libyan al-Qaeda operatives who wanted him overthrown and replaced with an Islamist regime.
An apologetic bin Laden gave Abu Anas and his compatriots bags of cash and scattered them around the world. Abu Anas ended up in Manchester, a known base of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
By then, according to U.S. prosecutors, he was already a leading figure in an al-Qaeda plot to mount a spectacular attack against U.S. interests in Africa, in revenge for American military action in Somalia.
He had begun conducting “photographic surveillance of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi” in late 1993, as part of a plot to attack it, according to Jamal al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda member turned U.S. government witness. His photographs were processed in a makeshift dark room in the apartment of L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a Moroccan alQaeda fighter and once bin Laden’s pilot, al-Fadl said.
Later, “bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” al-Fadl told a judge.
Four years later, the twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people and injured more than 4,000. Abu Anas was one of 20 al-Qaeda lieutenants named as bin Laden’s co-defendants in a criminal indictment for the bombings filed in a Manhattan court later that year.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Anas was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. A US$25-million reward, later reduced to US$5-million, was offered for information leading to his capture.
Only three of the 21 alQaeda operatives named in the 1998 indictment now remain at large. Eight, including bin Laden, have been killed. One died awaiting trial and nine, including Abu Anas, are in jail or custody awaiting trial.