Wanted and Arrest For Terrorist Activities
On May 26, 2004, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that reports indicated that Ghailani was one of seven al-Qaeda members who were planning a terrorist action for the summer or fall of 2004. The other alleged terrorists named on that date were Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who had also been earlier listed with Ghailani by the FBI as a Most Wanted Terrorist for the 1998 embassy attack, and Abderraouf Jdey, Amer El-Maati, Aafia Siddiqui, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, and Adnan G. El Shukrijumah. Jdey was already on the FBI Seeking Information – War on Terrorism list since January 17, 2002, to which the other four were added as well.
American Democrats labeled the warning "suspicious". Dismissing the threat, they said it was held solely to divert attention from President Bush's plummeting poll numbers and to push the failings of the Invasion of Iraq off the front page. CSIS director Reid Morden voiced similar concerns, saying it seemed more like "election year" politics, than an actual threat—and The New York Times pointed out that one day before the announcement, they had been told by the Department of Homeland Security that there were no current risks.
On July 25, 2004, a nearly eight hour battle ensued in the town of Gujrat in central Pakistan. Ghailani and thirteen others, included his wife and children, were arrested. A police officer was wounded in the battle. Pakistani Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat announced the capture of Ghailani on July 29, 2004. The US Government had offered a $5,000,000 USD bounty offered for information leading to the arrest of Ghailani.
Some press reports (including the New Republic) questioned whether the timing of the announcement of Ghailani's capture was politically motivated at the behest of the Bush administration. The announcement was made just hours before U.S. Presidential candidate John Kerry was due to make his acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, an event at which a candidate usually receives a significant boost in the polls. Hayyat made the announcement after midnight local time, despite having apparently known Ghailiani's identity for some days beforehand. Pakistani officials denied there was any such motivation.
Soon after the capture of Ghailani and the others with him, The Boston Globe, quoting a United Nations source, said that Ghailani was one of several al-Qaeda personnel who had been in Liberia around 2001, handling conflict diamonds under the protection of then-dictator Charles Taylor. Ghailani is said to have spent more than three years in Liberia.
Read more about this topic: Ahmed Ghailani
Famous quotes containing the words wanted, arrest, terrorist and/or activities:
“After all, poets shouldn’t be their own interpreters and shouldn’t carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“One does not arrest Voltaire.”
—Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)
“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one’s own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.”
—David Elkind (20th century)