Al-Qaida suspect lived playboy life

The alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks used to be a playboy who liked lounging in five star hotels and once flew a helicopter over the office of a woman he was trying to impress.

The insight into Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s personality was given today by top Philippines intelligence officials who spent years hunting the suspect while he lived in the Southeast Asian nation in the mid-1990s.

Mohammed was arrested on Saturday in Pakistan. He is now in US custody and interrogators are urgently questioning him about impending al-Qaida terrorist operations.

During his years living in the Philippines, Mohammed directed the operations of an al-Qaida cell that plotted to bomb US airliners flying out of Asia and to assassinate Pope John Paul, who visited Manila in 1995.

Philippine police intelligence director Roberto Delfin said Mohammed took time out from plotting terror attacks to learn how to scuba dive during one holiday at a beach resort south of the capital.

He went on the trip with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who was later sentenced to life in a US prison for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, former top police intelligence official Rodolfo Mendoza said.

Mohammed “projected himself as a rich businessman from Qatar, classy, educated, fluent in English. He went into scuba diving, had skills in flying. He had the smartness to elude arrest,” Mendoza said.

He lounged at coffee shops in Manila’s five star hotels and once flew a helicopter over the clinic of a Filipino dentist he was courting in order to impress her, Mendoza said.

The woman challenged Mohammed, who flew the helicopter himself, “to rent an aircraft and fly over her clinic while talking with the lady dentist through his mobile phone and waving,” Mendoza said.

To earn some money on the side, Mohammed worked as a carpet salesman, Delfin said.

“We didn’t know if it was his lifestyle or a cover, but the guy was certainly smart,” Mendoza said.

Mohammed and his companions would frequent nightclubs and hotel bars in Manila despite being Muslim, which bans alcohol, Mendoza said.

When the terror suspect arrived in the Philippines, he lived in a room in Yousef’s modest flat. But Mohammed later moved into a plush apartment in an affluent Manila suburb.