Mohammed’s capture a high point in war against terror
Kuwaiti-born Mohammed was one of three al-Qaida suspects detained in the city of Rawalpindi near the Pakistani capital Islamabad as part of Pakistan’s support for President Bush’s war on terror.
Mohammed, the self-proclaimed head of al-Qaida’s military committee and identified by US investigators as the key planner of the suicide plane attacks on New York and Washington, has been seen as pivotal to the operations of Osama bin Laden’s network.
Believed to be in his late 30s, the US put a $25 million price tag on Mohammed’s head and the FBI included him on its “most wanted” list of 22 terror suspects posted in October 2001.
According to the profile, Mohammed was born in Kuwait in 1965, but his family is from Baluchistan, one of two Pakistani provinces bordering Afghanistan.
He studied in the US for a time at Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school in North Carolina popular with Middle Eastern students, where he enrolled in a pre-engineering course.
He later enrolled as an engineering major at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro.
By the late 1980s he ended up in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, where he and his brothers frequented a small Arab circle that included bin Laden.
In 1995, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was arrested in Islamabad. Yousef, believed to be Mohammed’s nephew, was accused of being the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and is now serving a life sentence.
The following year, Mohammed was indicted in the US for his alleged role in a plot to blow up 12 US civilian airliners over the Pacific.
But he remained at large, and according to US investigators he travelled the globe in his role as a key al-Qaida recruiting agent and co-ordinator.
He is suspected of involvement in the bombing of US embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on a US warship in Yemen in 2000.
After the events of September 11, 2001, Mohammed is thought to have moved between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In September last year, Karachi police identified him as a man hit by a police sniper in a shootout with militants. This was later rejected by a suspected Pakistani militant.
A Pakistani newspaper, reporting on the clash, said investigators believed Mohammed was the man who slit the throat of US reporter Daniel Pearl in front of a camera after the journalist disappeared in Karachi last January while investigating a story on Islamic extremists.
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