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he Egyptian known as Midhat Mursi Al Sayyid Umar was supposed to be dead, killed in a US missile strike on suspected terrorists in Pakistan’s turbulent northwestern tribal belt on 13 January, 2006. Pakistani generals claimed he was one of several senior Al Qaeda figures slain by Hellfire missiles fired from a Central Intelligence Agency Predator at a clandestine gathering in the village of Damadola near the Afghan border. But it seems that Mursi, a chemical engineer known as Osama bin Laden’s “sorcerer”, with a $5m US bounty on his head, is still alive and, the Americans believe, working in secret laboratories across the badlands of the tribal zone to develop chemical, biological and radiological weapons – and maybe even nuclear weapons – for Al Qaeda. US intelligence officials were never convinced that Mursi, alias Abu Khabab Al Masri, died in Damadola and now even Pakistani intelligence chiefs concede that he’s alive and kicking. The Americans say that electronic surveillance of known and suspected Al Qaeda figures in recent months has turned up conversations in which Mursi is mentioned in the present tense. However, they have not been able to pinpoint his whereabouts because he has gone deep underground and is believed to communicate only by courier. But from what they have been able to piece together, they believe the 45-year-old Mursi has revived the chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme Al Qaeda had in Afghanistan before the US-led invasion in

October 2001. At that time, the Egyptian headed a programme codenamed Project Al Zabadi (Arabic for ‘curdled milk’) at Al Qaeda’s Darunta training complex in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. According to the evidence the Americans have put together from electronic intercepts, informants, the interrogation of captured militants and tracking Al Qaeda’s financial networks, Mursi is concentrating on manufacturing cyanide, chlorine and other lethal poisons. Chris Quillen, a former CIA analyst who until he left the agency in 2006 specialised in Al Qaeda’s efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD), said earlier this year that Mursi and his people may have made major advances in their Pakistani hideouts. “I’m not saying the programmes are great and ready for an attack tomorrow,” he said. “But whatever they lost in the 2001 invasion, they’re back at that level at this point.” Mursi is believed to have served with the Egyptian Army as an ordnance expert before he became involved in Bin Laden’s Project Al Zabadi at the Darunta complex about 120km east of Kabul. He was considered one of Al Qaeda’s master bomb-makers and was highly regarded despite his oversized ego and argumentative disposition. Computer files on Project Zabadi uncovered by the coalition in Afghanistan in 2002 showed that Bin Laden gave Mursi a startup budget in May 1999 to get the project off the ground. Because he had to account for the money, he videotaped his experiments that included using what seemed to be hydrogen cyanide on dogs. The tapes were captured by US forces. Mursi also worked on developing a pathogen identified as Agent X, which terrorism experts believe is almost certainly anthrax,

although US officials have long warned that Al Qaeda was seeking to produce botulinum toxin, smallpox, plague or ebola. At that time, according to US and western European intelligence agencies, Mursi headed a nine-member Al Qaeda committee that oversaw CBW development and possibly planning for any attacks using its deadly products. This group included some of Bin Laden’s top people, underlining the commitment of Al Qaeda Central to developing weapons of mass destruction. That commitment, US and European officials believe, has not diminished and it is likely that the committee has been reconstituted in Pakistan. The original committee included such people as Assadallah Abdul Rahman, a son of the blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the iconic radical convicted of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing in New York. The younger Rahman, who was in charge of procuring material for the programme, was captured in February 2003. Another member was Mustafa Setmariam Nassar, alias Abu Musab Al Suri, a veteran Al Qaeda figure with a $5m US bounty on his head. He was one of the network’s top strategists and ideologues who espoused global jihad and encouraged chemical warfare against the enemies of Islam. He worked closely with Mursi and was described by one counter-terrorism analyst as “the most dangerous terrorist you’ve never heard of”. The red-bearded Nassar, a dual citizen of Syria and Spain, was captured in Pakistan on 31 October, 2005. He was handed over to US agents several months later, a prize catch with intimate knowledge of Al Qaeda’s WMD programme. According to western CBW experts who examined Mursi’s Darunta operation following the dispersal of Al Qaeda by the

Europe’s intelligence services have warned that the likelihood of chemical or biological attacks is growing as Islamist extremists extend their cell network
us auThoriTies are permanently on “high alert”
8 The Middle easT May 2008

CurrenT aFFairs

he was considered one of Al Qaeda’s master bomb-makers and was highly regarded despite his oversized ego and argumentative disposition
known as “the sorcerer”, midhat mursi al sayyid umar was supposed to be dead

US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he appeared to be experimenting rather than actually producing weaponsgrade stocks at that time. The presumption is that he continued his efforts elsewhere when Al Qaeda was forced to flee. Mursi went to the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia with other Al Qaeda luminaries to find refuge with Chechen jihadis and began planning bioweapons attacks, largely employing North African personnel, according to US officials. The Russians have reported attempts by Islamist Chechen rebels to use chemical weapons. US officials say that these days Mursi is suspected of training special operatives in his lethal alchemy to carry out attacks in Europe. Western intelligence agencies have long believed Bin Laden hoped to unleash CBW attacks on the cities of the US and Europe to inflict the kind of mass casualties caused by the 9/11 suicide attacks. The US presidential commission that investigated the failure of US intelligence services to prevent 9/11, reported in March 2005 that these agencies had badly underestimated Al Qaeda’s efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons and still did not have a full understanding of the organisation’s capabilities. But if the reports of Mursi’s activities are anything to go by, that threat clearly remains. Europe’s intelligence services have warned that the likelihood of chemical or biological attacks is growing as Islamist extremists extend their cell network, increasingly comprised of veterans of the Iraq war, across the continent. There have been at least six Al Qaeda operations involving chemical weapons that have all been thwarted, including one reported plot to attack the New York subway

system with cyanide that was supposedly scrapped by Al Qaeda itself. Jordanian authorities say they foiled a major chemical attack on Amman in 2004. Although there is some scepticism that the plot was as ambitious as the Jordanians claimed it was, it illustrated the kind of mass-casualty attack Al Qaeda sought to mount in the West. The plot to attack the New York subway with cyanide was supposedly scheduled for the spring of 2003, about the time the USled invasion of Iraq took place. Whether there was any correlation between the two remains unclear. The plot was first reported in June 2006 in a book, The One Percent Doctrine by journalist Ron Suskind. He claimed Al Qaeda had successfully developed a portable device to disperse cyanide gas, which kills when it is inhaled. US security officials confirmed that a plot had been foiled, but gave no details. It was presumably modelled on the 20 March, 1995, attack on Tokyo’s subway by a little-known doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) with sarin, a lethal nerve gas developed by the Nazis in World War II. Twelve people were killed and more than 5,000 were injured, some permanently. Ayman Al Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s deputy and eminence grise who was apparently in charge of the plot, called off the attack 45 days before it was scheduled to be launched, possibly because it was not deemed apocalyptic enough to surpass the 9/11 carnage. Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA officer who headed the unit tasked with tracking Bin Laden, wrote after the book was published: “This judgment seems to be on solid ground. Since declaring war on the United States in 1996, Osama bin Laden has

repeatedly underscored his preferred method of operation … incrementally increase the pain that (Al Qaeda’s) attacks cause the United States until it forces Washington to change its polities toward Israel and the Muslim world.” Scheuer questioned that if thousands of people killed in the New York subway did not satisfy Bin Laden, what would? The answer, he surmised, “may well be the detonation of a nuclear weapon of some sort. While there is no definitive evidence that Al Qaeda has such a device, the group has a specialised unit – staffed by hard scientists and engineers – that has sought one since at least 1992, and events … suggest that such a possibility remains current.” In April 2004, Jordanian authorities claimed to have thwarted a major chemical attack in Amman masterminded by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, then leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Jordanian-born Zarqawi, a fierce opponent of the Hashemite monarchy, was killed in a US air strike near Baghdad on 7 June, 2006. According to confessions made by several of the suspects on television – a practice used by Arab governments in which the prisoners’ statements are generally seen as carefully stage-managed – the group planned to use three trucks packed with explosives and 20 tons of toxic chemicals to attack the Dairat Al Mukhabarat, the hilltop headquarters of the General Intelligence Department (GID), on the outskirts of Amman; the prime minister’s office; and the US Embassy. According to King Abdullah II, the militants planned to decapitate the Jordanian government. Had the attack actually taken place it would have been the first terrorist CBW operation on that scale.
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