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By Root 1068 0

of an Islamic State of South Asia, and the number four in Al Qaeda, the only non-Arab in such a senior position.64 It is likely that he directed Khalid Sheikh’s eyes eastwards. Khalid’s terrorist nephew, Ramzi Yousef, lived in Karachi too, where he spent much time with Abdul Murad, a friend who had trained as a pilot, but having failed the exam so many times could not find a job. Their talk turned to killing, for that is what Murad liked to do. ‘I enjoy it. You can kill them [Americans] by umm, gas. You can kill them by gun. You can kill them by knife. You can kill them by explosion. There’s many kinds,’ as he later told Filipino investigators. Murad suggested dive-bombing the CIA headquarters at Langley or the Pentagon with a light aircraft packed with chemicals and explosives, a scheme that caught Yousef’s imagination, although he thought spraying the building with deadly chemicals from a crop duster might be more lethal. Osama bin Laden then intervened from afar, suggesting that Yousef assassinate Bill Clinton in November 1994 when he was due to arrive on a five-day tour of Asia. There was talk of using a Stinger missile to down Air Force One as it came in to land. These men were not adolescent fantasists talking large in some Pakistani suburb of Beeston or Leeds, but professional killers with huge rewards on their heads.

Yousef moved into an apartment with Murad where he manufactured bombs. While scraping lead azide from a container—it being a volatile substance used in detonators—it exploded in his face. After a spell in hospital, he flew to Bangkok, not for a rest, but to try to blow up the Israeli embassy. He and Islamist Thai accomplices rented a truck and driver. They strangled the driver and put his corpse in the back, along with a one-tonne bomb wired up to the transmission. Never lucky with his choice of driver, Yousef was appalled when the man he selected crashed the truck into cars and pedal-taxis at an intersection near the embassy. There it remained as the police cars arrived. After a two-month break back in Pakistan, Yousef took up an offer from the Iranian rebel movement, the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq Organisation, to launch a bomb attack on a Shia shrine in Iran. At the height of the Ashura festival, a high-explosive C-4 device made by him demolished a wall at the shrine of Reza, killing twenty-six Muslim pilgrims and injuring two hundred others.

Khalid Sheikh and Yousef plus one Wali Shah arrived in Manila, where the two younger men had already acquired girlfriends in the Philippine capital’s many go-go bars. Khalid Sheikh, by now using the name Abdul Majid, and Shah rented apartments there while Yousef took up residence in the Manor hotel. They held meetings in the city’s karaoke and go-go bars, plotting holy murder in places filled with mirrors, flashing lights and half-naked dancers. They hired a helicopter to survey the city. Khalid Sheikh took up with a Filipina dentist, sometimes phoning her from the helicopters so she could look up and wave at her paramour. They purchased priests’ robes and Bibles, for the reason they were in Manila was to assassinate pope John Paul II, having given up on the heavily protected US president. To that end they rented an apartment along the route his holiness was most likely to take. This was not the only plot under way because, since his discussions with Murad, Yousef had become obsessed with downing large planes. He developed a new bomb, involving nitroglycerine disguised in containers for contact-lens solution, and a timer made from a Casio Databank watch which had the advantage of an alarm that could be set for up to twelve months ahead. The batteries used to power the lightbulbs which (their glass having been deliberately weakened) would set the thing off could be hidden in the heels of shoes, as they did not come within the range of airport X-ray machinery. He tried out a mini-version of this device in a Manila cinema. Then he summoned the pilot Murad. On 8 December, Yousef took a flight from Manila to Tokyo. He assembled his little bomb in the lavatory, and then