Most wanted man evaded capture for years

As the suspected king pin of the September 11 attacks on the United States and a key lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was one of the world’s most wanted men.

The Kuwaiti has long been associated with terror around the world and is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef – the man responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Mohammed, 37, who is often seen as the man who gets the money to hijackers, is thought to be closely associated with members of bin Laden’s inner circle.

In 1996, federal prosecutors in New York charged him in connection with an alleged plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific the previous year.

He was said to have worked on the plots with Yousef, who was jailed for life in 1997 for the World Trade Centre bombing, which left six people dead.

But even with a $25m (€23m) reward on his head, Mohammed, who was on the FBI’s most wanted” list, proved an elusive figure.

He has been in hiding since the September 11 attacks.

He also evaded several earlier attempts to capture him in Pakistan, the Philippines and Qatar and has moved around under various aliases.

US officials have described Mohammed as the “nuts and bolts” planner of September 11 and believe him to be on the “top rung” of bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network.

Last June, one senior official said: “He’s the most significant operational player out there right now.”

In all incidents in which he is suspected of having been involved, his main role is seen as being the key link in securing methods of transferring money to suicide hijackers.

For the September 11 attacks, he is also believed to have been involved in picking targets and attack dates, and providing training to the cells chosen to carry them out.

A US counter-terrorism official once said that most of the 19 suicide hijackers were not believed to have known the full extent of the plot – or that they were going to die – although Mohammed apparently did.

But he also had a reputation of living the high life and chasing women.

He is known to have been in the Philippines in the mid-1990s, along with Yousef.

He is said to have visited nightclubs, gone scuba diving and rented a helicopter to impress a prospective girlfriend.

Fluent in Arabic, English, Urdu and Baluchi, he is a former student of the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, from where he graduated in 1986.