The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [122]
Three of the assassins were captured, and one fled back to Sudan.
The Ethiopian police quickly pieced together the plot, exposing the complicity of the Sudanese government. The debacle led to a unanimous vote in the United Nations to impose stiff economic sanctions on Sudan. The Sudanese representative denied the charges, but the Sudanese delegation was already in disfavor, having been implicated only two years earlier in a plot to blow up UN headquarters, a part of the blind sheikh’s plan to destroy New York City landmarks. The international community had had enough of Turabi’s revolution, but Turabi managed to make things worse by praising the attempted murder of Mubarak. “The sons of the Prophet Moses, the Muslims, rose up against him, confounded his plans, and sent him back to his country,” he said. As for his future relations with the Egyptian president, Turabi remarked, “I found the man to be very far below my level of thinking and my views, and too stupid to understand my pronouncements.”
There was a reckoning coming, as everyone knew.
MUBARAK’S SECURITY FORCES fanned out all across Egypt, from the slums of Cairo to the mud-brick villages of the upper Nile, to destroy the radical Islamist movement. Houses were burned. Suspects disappeared. Sometimes a mother was dragged out on the street and stripped naked, and her children were warned that she would be raped if their brother was not present the next time they came. Mubarak instituted an anti-terrorism law that made it a crime to even express sympathy for terrorist movements. Five new prisons were built to house the thousands of suspects that were rounded up, many of whom were never charged.
To deal with Zawahiri, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish plan. They lured a thirteen-year-old boy named Ahmed into an apartment with the promise of juice and videos. Ahmed was the son of Mohammed Sharraf, a well-known Egyptian fundamentalist and a senior member of al-Jihad. The boy was drugged and sodomized; when he awakened, he was confronted with photographs of the homosexual activity and threatened with the prospect of having them shown to his father. For the child, the consequences of such a disclosure were overwhelming. “It could even be that the father would kill him,” a source close to Zawahiri admitted.
Egyptian intelligence forced him to recruit another child, Mus‘ab, whose father, Abu al-Faraj was also in al-Jihad and served as the treasurer for al-Qaeda. Mus‘ab endured the same humiliating initiation of drugs and sexual abuse and was forced to turn against his family. The agents taught the boys how to plant microphones in their own homes and photograph documents. A number of arrests followed because of the information produced by the boy spies.
The Egyptian agents then decided to use the boys to kill Zawahiri. They gave Mus‘ab a bomb to place inside a five-story apartment building where Zawahiri’s family lived. But Zawahiri was not there, and Sudanese intelligence discovered the bomb. The other child, Ahmed, was in the hospital, suffering from malaria. He had not yet been revealed as a spy. His physician was Zawahiri, who visited him every day. The Egyptian agents learned from Ahmed what time to expect his doctor. The next day an assassination team was waiting, but for whatever reason, Zawahiri didn’t come.
An even better opportunity arose, however: Egyptian intelligence learned of a meeting of al-Jihad’s shura council. An agent gave Mus‘ab a suitcase bomb and instructed him to place it in the office where Zawahiri and his companions would be meeting. As the boy got out of the agent’s car, however, both the Sudanese intelligence and Jihad security were waiting for him. The Egyptian agent sped away, leaving the boy to his fate.
Al-Jihad and Sudanese intelligence quarreled