Middle East dispatch

Piecing together the terrorist jigsaw

Investigations into the bombing of USS Cole suggest small band of key players in Bin Laden's network, writes Brian Whitaker
One year ago this month, a man with a beard and spectacles drove down to the beach in Aden and gave a 12-year-old boy some money to mind his car. He dragged a rubber dinghy from the car roof and put out to sea, but he never came back.

Later that morning, a small boat pulled alongside the USS Cole as it refuelled in Aden harbour. Two men on the craft saluted, then blew themselves up, taking 17 American sailors with them and almost sinking the $1bn (£690,000,000) guided-missile destroyer.

Twelve months on, eight men are in jail awaiting trial, the Yemeni authorities are looking for three more, and almost everyone suspects a connection with Osama bin Laden.

Despite a year-long investigation by the US and Yemeni authorities there is still no firm proof that Bin Laden ordered the attack but there are a remarkable number of links to other incidents that he is suspected of orchestrating: the 1998 embassy bombing in east Africa, the foiled millennium plot and the September 11 attacks in the US.

Bin Laden himself celebrated the bombing of USS Cole with a poem he recited at his son's wedding last January:

A destroyer: even the brave fear its might.
It inspires horror in the harbour and in the open sea.
She sails into the waves
Flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power.
To her doom she moves slowly
A dinghy awaits her, riding the waves.

The trail from the abandoned car on the shore led to a flat in Aden - one of three safe houses used by the conspirators - and to a series of bogus identity documents provided by corrupt Yemeni officials.

At one house, the suspects had erected a corrugated fence to block the view of neighbours, who complained about constant work on the boat that was later packed with explosives.

A month before the attack, the bombers had taken their boat for a test drive in Aden harbour - and coolly enlisted the help of a local fisherman to launch it. On the day before the attack, a Yemeni called Yasser al-Azzani entertained the bombers to lunch at his house. He is now under arrest, though it is not clear whether he knew about their plans. Another man prepared to make a video of the bombing but apparently chickened out at the last minute.

At the end of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, many veterans of the conflict moved to Yemen where they have caused trouble ever since. As a country where government control does not stretch far beyond the main cities, it proved an ideal place to set up training camps. While local jihad members may have been involved in a minor way in the attack on USS Cole, it is clear that the key roles were played by people from outside.

Jamal al-Badawi, regarded as the most senior of the arrested suspects, told investigators that he received telephone instructions for the bombing from Mohammed Omar al-Harazi in the United Arab Emirates. Badawi said he had originally met Harazi in Afghanistan during the war.

According to US officials, Harazi, who sometimes uses the names Abdul Rahman Hussein al-Nashari or al-Nassir, is a cousin of the suicide bomber who blew up the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998. He had been a regular visitor to Aden but disappeared four days before the attack on the USS Cole.

Last week, Abd al-Karim al-Iryani, who was prime minister of Yemen at the time of the Cole attack, told the Guardian that Harazi was also the organiser of a Bin Laden plot to blow up the US embassy in India, which was foiled last June. "In India, Harazi did exactly what he did in Aden - prepared everything, then left," he said.

After the bombing, FBI investigators removed "confetti-sized" pieces of flesh from Aden harbour to check the DNA. They also took DNA samples from the Yemeni relatives of several suspects. They now believe that one of the suicide bombers was Abd al-Muhsin al-Taifi, who had been wanted for questioning about the Nairobi bombing.

The man in charge of training for the Cole attack, according to the US, was Raed Hijazi, a former Boston taxi driver, who is an American citizen of Palestinian origin. Jordanian security officials say he is a close associate of Mohammed Abu Zubayda, a member of Bin Laden's inner circle.

Hijazi was arrested in Syria at the end of last year and later transferred to Jordan where he had been sentenced to death in his absence for involvement in Bin Laden's alleged millennium plot, which included targets in Jordan and the US.

There is also evidence that the suicide attack in Aden was originally planned as part of the millennium plot. Suspects have told the investigators of earlier attempt to blow up an American destroyer, USS Sullivans, as it refuelled in Aden on January 3 2000. That attack was called off when the weight of explosives made the bombers' boat unseaworthy.

Earlier this month, Jordanian security sources disclosed that they had foiled a very similar plan to assassinate King Abdullah and his family during a Mediterranean holiday in summer 2000. The plot, allegedly by an Islamic group linked to Bin Laden, was to launch a suicide attack against the royal family's yacht with an explosives-laden speedboat.

A further piece in the jigsaw emerged when the FBI revealed that Khalid al-Midhar, a hijacker aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 had earlier been caught on a surveillance video in Malaysia meeting a man suspected of involvement in the Cole attack.

But that is not the whole story, according to Abd al-Karim al-Iryani. "Khalid al-Midhar was one of the Cole perpetrators, involved in preparations," he said. "He was in Yemen at the time and stayed after the Cole bombing for a while, then he left."

All these connections between the different attacks are certainly intriguing. But perhaps they also tell us something useful. Although thousands of people are said to have trained for jihad in Afghanistan, in Bin Laden's most notoriously spectacular operations the same names keep cropping up.

That, at least, suggests that the number of people in his network who have real technical expertise may be smaller than we imagine.

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