LONDON, April 25, (AFP):The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks warned that al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe which will unleash a “nuclear hellstorm” if Osama bin Laden is captured, leaked files revealed Monday.

The terror group also planned to make a 9/11 style attack on London’s Heathrow airport by crashing a hijacked airliner into one of the terminals, the files showed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the nuclear device if the al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed, according to the classified files released by the WikiLeaks website.

Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has been held at Guantanamo since 2006 and is to be tried in a military court at the US naval base on Cuba over the attacks.

His nuclear threat was revealed in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, one of several media outlets which have published the classified assessments of detainees at Guantanamo.

The German weekly Der Spiegel, also citing WikiLeaks, said that Sheikh Mohammed had told his interrogators he had set up two cells for the purpose of attacking Heathrow in 2002.
The aim was to seize control of an airliner shortly after take-off from Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest aiports, turn it around and crash it into one of the four terminals.

Sheikh Mohammed said one cell had been formed with the aim of taking flying lessons in Kenya, while the other had been tasked with recruiting participants.

He said the plot had been discussed several times at the highest level of al-Qaeda. One component had involved the infiltration of ground staff at the airport, according to Der Spiegel.
Another attack given the green light in late 2001 would have targeted “the tallest buildings in California” with hijacked airliners, Der Spiegel reported.

The attackers would have gained access to the airliner cockpits by setting off small bombs hidden in their shoes, it said.

Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003 in Pakistan, also claims to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 with his “blessed right hand” and to have helped in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.

Der Spiegel noted that his “confessions” should have be treated with caution as they could have been extracted through torture. Sheikh Mohammed is known to have undergone the method known as “waterboarding.”

Former US president George W. Bush claimed in his memoirs published last year that using the interrogation technique — which simulates drowning — helped prevent planned attacks on Heathrow and London’s Canary Wharf business district.

He also told the London Times newspaper in November that it was “damn right” that he had authorised use of the method on Sheikh Mohammed.
Meanwhile, bin Laden and his deputy spent a frantic three months traveling non-stop across Afghanistan after 9/11, according to secret US military files released by WikiLeaks.
The documents, part of intelligence assessments of Guantanamo detainees, showed that bin Laden told Arab fighters just four days after the September 11, 2001 attacks to take up arms in Afghanistan against the “infidel invaders,” according to the Washington Post.

In one sign of how desperate bin Laden had grown after narrowly escaping from the Tora Bora cave complex of eastern Afghanistan in mid-December 2001, the al-Qaeda leader was so strapped for cash that he borrowed $7,000 from a protector, reimbursing him within a year, the documents showed.

At some point before their escape from Tora Bora, Saudi-born bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri were said to have hosted a steady stream of visitors and ordered their followers to continue attacking Western targets from a makeshift headquarters at a secret guesthouse in or around Kabul.
Bin Laden had his fighters leave training camps and told some of his wives and other women and children to flee to neighboring Pakistan.

On October 7, 2001, during the first days of the US-led bombing campaign of Afghanistan, bin Laden met with top Taleban official Mullah Mansour in the group’s spiritual homeland of Kandahar.
Zawahiri accompanied him that month for a meeting with Jalaluddin Haqqani, who still leads a Taleban insurgency targeting the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, the Post added.
Bin Laden then escaped to his Tora Bora refuge that November with Zawahiri and members of his security detail.

He told his associates to “remain strong in their commitment to fight, to obey the leaders, to help the Taleban, and that it was a grave mistake and taboo to leave before the fight was completed,” the documents showed.
Terrorist

US investigators who screened prisoners considered Pakistani intelligence to be a terrorist group, leaked documents said Monday, laying bare the deep mistrust between the two countries’ spies.
A secret 2007 US list of “terrorist and terrorist support entities” listed Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) alongside some 70 other groups including Iranian intelligence, the Taleban, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The list appeared on a memorandum from the controversial US camp for war prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and was obtained and released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

The exposure of the private US assessment may cause new strains in the relationship between the United States and ISI, which has longstanding ties to militants but has also worked closely with the CIA.
Top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen was unusually blunt on a visit to Islamabad last week, saying that ISI ties to Afghanistan’s al-Qaeda-allied Haqqani network had caused strains with the United States.
In another part of the leaked document, Guantanamo investigators are told that association with the ISI “in the late 1990s up to 2003” was a sign of Taleban or al-Qaeda affiliation.

Pakistan helped create the Taleban, who imposed an austere brand of Islam on Afghanistan after taking over in 1996. But Pakistan allied with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks planned by Afghan-based al-Qaeda.

Pakistan, which has received billions of dollars in US aid in the past decade, has bristled at suggestions it is playing a double-game, noting that militants have killed thousands of Pakistanis and even attacked the ISI’s headquarters.

Blunders
The United States has botched the handling of inmates at Guantanamo, holding men for years without reliable evidence while releasing others who posed a grave threat, according to the leaked secret documents.
The trove of classified files released by WikiLeaks showed US officials struggling with often flawed evidence and confused about the guilt or innocence of detainees held at the prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, media reported Monday.

Hundreds of inmates who turned out to have no serious terror links were held without trial, based on vague or inaccurate information, including accounts from unreliable fellow detainees or statements from men who had been abused or tortured, the New York Times quoted the documents as saying.
One poor Afghan farmer with no ties to militants was held for two years without trial in a case of mistaken identity, the documents showed.

But US authorities in 2004 decided to release Abdullah Mehsud, a Taleban extremist who duped his interrogators into believing he had been conscripted by the insurgents as a driver.
“Detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests,” said a 2003 document, quoted by the Times.

Mehsud, who gave a false name to his American interrogators, was sent back to Afghanistan where he organized a Taleban unit to assault US troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior ministry that claimed 31 lives, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers and set off a suicide bomb in 2007 in Pakistan — winning praise from al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

President Barack Obama’s administration, which has struggled to close the controversial Guantanamo prison, denounced the “unfortunate” release of the classified documents, part of a massive cache of secret memos leaked to WikiLeaks last year.

The government said in a statement the Obama and Bush administrations had “made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo.”