Knock on enough doors, and one or two will open. Go find the people who knew KSM: friends, relatives, co-workers. I decided I would treat the story as I would an ordinary crime story. But there was enough there for a start, enough to formulate a hypothesis I could test in some pretty bleak patches around the world. The dossier was filled with educated guesses, some of them pretty wide of the mark. I read through the materials as best as I was able and arranged to have copies made when the power returned. The candlelight danced with the wind the documents rustled and were visible in brief glimpses, then gone again to darkness.
#Khalid muhammed windows#
The office had tall French windows the one Boogie opened remained ajar, allowing the wind to slice through the room. It seemed to be complete.īoogie sent someone to fetch candles. Boogie opened a window to see how far the darkness extended. At that precise moment, a bolt of lightning struck nearby, knocking out the power and, with it, the lights. So I knew that opportunities like the one I had that night in Lingayen were bright bits stolen from a reluctant universe.Ī thunderstorm raged outside as I settled in to read. Many of those discoveries turn out to be wrong or, as often, irrelevant. Maybe others are better or luckier, but for me the world reveals itself only in dribs and drabs. I’m waiting, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, for fortune to be kind.
Luckily, I’ve been blessed with obstinance. Journalists spend most of their time waiting. Among the materials Boogie had assembled was a dossier on Mohammed, whom investigators now routinely refer to as KSM. They had also determined he was the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, about whom virtually nothing was known. A thunderstorm raged outside the neocolonial police headquarters when, after introductions, the investigator pulled several file boxes out of a closet, set them on a table and let me have at them.īy that time American investigators had learned that Yousef’s real name was Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, an ethnic Pakistani born and raised in Kuwait, educated in Wales, with a specialty in electronics. He was so obsessed his bosses eventually got tired of hearing about it and exiled him to Lingayen, nestled on a bay in the South China Sea, about 100 miles north of Manila.īoogie had taken his files with him and was happy to share them with me. But Boogie was obsessed with the details of the airplane plot. After a worldwide manhunt, he was eventually caught in Pakistan, seemingly putting an end to the affair. The man who appeared to have led this effort, known as Ramzi Yousef, was already being sought by American police for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. The plotters were also making plans to assassinate the pope.
#Khalid muhammed how to#
They also found a laptop, a chemical dictionary, two Bibles, two crucifixes and a manual on how to hear Roman Catholic confessions. They filled two police vans with bomb-making materials collected from the site. To their surprise, they found the apartment had been turned into a bomb factory.
The lead plotter fled before the fire department and police responded. The plan was stopped when a fire broke out in the kitchen of the plotters’ small Manila apartment. Two of the men were tasked with boarding a third flight and placing a third bomb.Īll the timers were set so that the bombs would explode at roughly the same time, sending thousands of people, presumed because of their destinations to be mainly Americans, to their deaths. The men would deplane at the next stop and board another flight and repeat the bomb assembly. On board they would assemble tiny chemical bombs and attach them to Casio watches, which would be the timers. The plot involved five men boarding as many as a dozen American jumbo jets scheduled to fly across the Pacific to the United States. Boogie was obsessed with a terrorist plot from the mid-1990s, when he had been a lead investigator with the national police in Manila. We had made the journey to Lingayen to talk to a cop named Boogie Mendoza.