Two
sons of the Qaeda suspect known as Abu Anas al-Libi, Abdullah, left,
and Abdul Moheman, on Sunday near the place in Tripoli, Libya, where
their father was arrested in a United States commando raid. By BENJAMIN WEISER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: October 6, 2013
An accused operative for Al Qaeda seized by United States commandos in
Libya over the weekend is being interrogated while in military custody
on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said on Sunday. He is
expected eventually to be sent to New York for criminal prosecution.
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Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, who is also known as Abu Anas al-Libi.
James DeAngio/U.S. Navy, via Reuters
A file photo of the Navy transport ship San Antonio, where Abu Anas was being questioned.
The fugitive, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, is seen as a potential
intelligence gold mine, possessing perhaps two decades of information
about Al Qaeda, from its early days under Osama bin Laden in Sudan to
its more scattered elements today.
The decision to hold Abu Anas and question him for intelligence purposes
without a lawyer present follows a pattern used successfully by the
Obama administration with other terrorist suspects, most prominently in
the case of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a former military commander with
the Somali terrorist group Shabab.
Mr. Warsame was captured in 2011 by the American military in the Gulf of
Aden and interrogated aboard a Navy ship for about two months without
being advised of his rights or provided a lawyer.
After a break of several days, Mr. Warsame was advised of his rights,
waived them, was questioned for about a week by law enforcement agents
and was then sent to Manhattan for prosecution.
“Warsame is the model for this guy,” one American security official said.
Mr. Warsame later pleaded guilty and has been cooperating
with the government, providing intelligence information about his
co-conspirators, who included “high-level international terrorist
operatives,” federal prosecutors have said in court papers.
Abu Anas is being held aboard the U.S.S. San Antonio, a vessel brought in specifically for this mission, officials said.
Abu Anas, 49, who was born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, was indicted in
Manhattan in 2000 on charges of conspiring with Bin Laden in plots to
attack United States forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, as well
as in the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi,
Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people.
He has been described as a Qaeda computer expert and helped to conduct
surveillance of the embassy in Nairobi, according to evidence in trials
stemming from the bombings. In investigating the attacks, the
authorities recovered a Qaeda terrorism manual in Abu Anas’s residence
in Manchester, England.
The manual is a detailed treatise on how to carry out terrorist
missions. It focuses on forged documents, safe houses, surveillance,
assassinations, codes and interrogation techniques. It also cites
“blasting and destroying the embassies and attacking vital economic
centers,” and it endorses the use of explosives, saying they “strike the
enemy with sheer terror and fright.”
It is not known if Abu Anas wrote the manual, but federal prosecutors
introduced it as evidence in the 2001 trial of four operatives convicted
in the bombings conspiracy, and in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan
Ghailani, the first former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be tried in the federal system.
The manual was also used in a 2006 trial in Virginia over whether to
impose the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th
hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. (He received a life sentence.)
The Defense Department, in a statement on Sunday, said Abu Anas was
“currently lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location
outside of Libya.”
“Wherever possible,” the statement said, “our first priority is and
always has been to apprehend terrorist suspects, and to preserve the
opportunity to elicit valuable intelligence that can help us protect the
American people.”
Officials declined on Sunday to confirm that New York was Abu Anas’s
destination, but two officials suggested it was likely.
The seizure of Abu Anas was carried out by American troops assisted by
F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Navy SEALs, meanwhile, carried out a raid on
the Somali coast, trying without success to capture a senior leader of
the Shabab, the group that carried out the massacre at the Nairobi
shopping mall two weeks ago.
Another American official emphasized that the commando raids in Libya
and Somalia were designed to capture the intended targets, not to kill
them with Predator drone missiles, the signature counterterrorism weapon
of the Obama administration.
“If we can, capturing terrorists provides valuable intelligence that we
can’t get if we kill them,” said the official, who like others spoke on
the condition of anonymity because of the continuing interrogation.
Abu Anas is one of about two dozen defendants charged in federal court
in Manhattan in a series of indictments that began in 1998, when Bin Laden was charged, and which expanded over the years to add other operatives.
With Abu Anas’s capture, only a handful of those operatives are believed
to remain alive and at large, most prominently Ayman al-Zawahiri, the
deputy to Bin Laden who succeeded the Qaeda leader after he was killed
in a 2011 American operation.
One of Bin Laden’s former close aides, a Sudanese named Jamal Ahmed
al-Fadl who defected from the group in the mid-1990s and became a
cooperating witness for the American government, testified in 2001 that
Abu Anas was a computer engineer who ran the group’s computers.
Abu Anas was also part of a small team of Qaeda operatives that in the
early 1990s traveled to Nairobi and carried out surveillance of the
American Embassy and other potential bomb targets, according to the
indictment and other evidence.
The photographs, diagrams and surveillance report from the Nairobi
mission were ultimately reviewed by Bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, the
government has said.
“Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to
where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” another member of the
surveillance team, Ali A. Mohamed, said in federal court when he pleaded
guilty to conspiracy in 2000.
News of Abu Anas’s capture was welcomed by family members of victims.
“Of course, our hearts are still very much tied to that day,” said Edith
Bartley, whose father, Julian L. Bartley Sr., the consul general, and
brother, Julian L. Bartley Jr., a college student working as an intern,
were both killed in the attack in Nairobi.
Ms. Bartley said her mother, Sue, traveled regularly to New York from
the Washington area for the Ghailani trial in 2010, and she said they
would both attend any trial involving Abu Anas.
“It’s a reminder to the courts and to others involved that the person
who’s on trial impacted real people, people who were serving their
country abroad,” she said.
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