Captured former spy chief could by link to al-Qaida

Former Iraqi spymaster Farouk Hijazi, captured by US forces, could be the man to link Saddam Hussein’s regime to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network.

It was Hijazi who allegedly met the terrorist mastermind in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

“It’s a big catch. This man was involved in a number of contacts with al-Qaida,” former CIA director James Woolsey said today.

Haidar Ahmed, a spokesman for the opposition Iraqi National Congress in London, said Hijazi had served as Saddam’s ambassador to Turkey from the late 1990s until soon after the September 11 attacks.

He was then summoned back to Baghdad following reports linking him to bin Laden, and was sent to Tunisia as ambassador in the last six months.

Ahmed claimed Hijazi was a crucial link between the regime and al-Qaida.

Hijazi was “one of the main channels between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden himself. As much as Iraqi intelligence was involved with al-Qaida, Hijazi was involved,” he said.

He added that the Iraqi diplomat also had an important role organising Iraqi sleeper cells in Europe that planned assassinations, smuggling operations and intelligence gathering.

Hijazi went to Damascus and tried to enter Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s regime, but it was not clear why, Ahmed said.

Born to a Palestinian family, Hijazi “won the Iraqi ruling family’s favour by the zeal with which he went about executing their opponents, both in Iraq and abroad,” the Guardian reported.

In the 1990s, he became head of external operations for Saddam’s feared Mukhabarat security agency, which was run by Saddam’s son Qusay.

Iraq first tried to place Hijazi as ambassador to Canada, but that country reportedly refused to accept him as an envoy.

In 1998, he became Iraq’s ambassador to Turkey. In December of that year, he travelled to Afghanistan and reportedly met bin Laden, US officials said.

The details of the meeting in Kandahar, a region in south-eastern Afghanistan where al-Qaida ran training camps, are not known. But American officials have pointed to it as a clear link between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida. Iraq has denied the meeting took place.

There have been other reports that Hijazi also met bin Laden in 1996 or earlier.

Newsweek magazine claimed Hijazi also met Mohammed Atta, chief hijacker in the September 11 attacks, in Prague in April 2001 – but other sources have cast doubt on that report.