Atta 'met bin Laden at Afghan camp in '99'

MOHAMED ATTA, the lead September 11 hijacker, met Osama bin Laden at an Afghan training camp in December 1999, it was reported yesterday.

The meeting, which has not been reported before, is among the latest discoveries by US investigators trying to piece together how the attacks were planned and carried out, The New York Times said.

The investigators believe Atta was with other leaders of the plot and that they talked to bin Laden about undertaking a terrorist operation.

Much of the new information comes from interviews with al-Qaida members captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The newspaper said it provides the strongest evidence that bin Laden personally supported the 19 men who carried out the deadliest foreign attack on US soil. Atta has emerged as an even more important organiser than was previously known, a figure who might not have created the plot but who took early command of it and was viewed, in the words of one of the other hijackers, as “the boss.”

Also, US officials have become increasingly confident that a 37-year-old Kuwaiti, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was one of the plot’s central planners.

Interviews with al-Qaida prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, the highest ranking operative in custody, have confirmed the suspicions about Khalid.

Investigators believe he is an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 attack on New York’s World Trade Center. A report said Khalid was arrested in June in Karachi and had been handed to the US, but Islamabad officials denied this.