Time Magazine: DEADLY CARGO http://xrl.us/7d4m

Deadly Cargo

By Alex Perry, in Chittagong

TIME

Monday, October 14, 2002

As it headed for port through the midwinter dusk, there was

little about the M.V. Mecca that stood out from the other

boats plying the waters off southern Bangladesh.

Portworkers and fishermen noted the same squat deckhouse

and plump hold that for centuries have sheltered fishermen

from the cyclones of the Bay of Bengal. The Mecca had the

usual rusted rigging and smoke-blackened stern. And the

crew too was like most others working off Chittagong: pure

Rohingyas -- stocky Muslim refugees from western Burma.

Only the thick salt marks high on the Mecca's bow hinted

that it was ending a voyage longer than most fishing trips.

But this was Chittagong, South Asia's premier hub for

pirates, gunrunners and smugglers. When the dockworkers saw

the Mecca anchoring on a sandbank three kilometers out to

sea on the night of Dec. 21, it was a signal to all not to

ask questions.

For nine months the exact nature of the Mecca's cargo or

the shipment's eventual destination remained unknown. But

there were clues. Portworkers that night said they saw five

motor launches ferry in large groups of men from the boat

wearing black turbans, long beards and traditional Islamic

salwar kameez. Their towering height suggested these

travelers were foreigners, and the boxes of ammunition and

the AK-47s slung across their shoulders helped sketch a

sinister picture. Then in July, a senior member of

Bangladesh's largest terrorist group, the 2,000-strong al-

Qaeda-allied Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), told TIME

the 150 men who entered Bangladesh that night were Taliban

and al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan. Three senior

Bangladeshi military sources also confirmed this was the

case. And on Oct. 7, Indian police arrested Burmese-born

HUJI fighter and weapons courier Fazle Karim (alias Abu

Fuzi) as he arrived in Calcutta by train from Kashmir. A

veteran of al-Qaeda's camps in eastern Afghanistan who told

his interrogators he had twice met Osama bin Laden, Karim

said he recognized two people he had trained with in

Afghanistan while visiting HUJI hideouts in Bangladesh in

August. The pair told him they were part of a group of

"more than 100 Arabs and Afghans belonging to al-Qaeda and

the Taliban who had arrived by ship at Chittagong in

winter," Karim said, according to transcripts of his

interview with Indian police.

The arrival of a large al-Qaeda group in the capital Dhaka

that night raises pressing concerns that Bangladesh may

have become a dangerous new front in America's war on

terror. Indeed, one Bangladeshi newspaper last month even

quoted an unnamed foreign embassy in Dhaka as saying Osama

bin Laden's No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been

hiding out in the country for months after arriving in

Chittagong. (Last week, in an audio message that

authorities have tentatively authenticated, al-Zawahiri

warned of further attacks against the U.S., vowing that it

will not go "unpunished for its crimes.") According to a

source inside a Bangladeshi Islamic group with close ties

to al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri arrived in Dhaka in early March

and stayed briefly in the compound of a local

fundamentalist leader. It's unclear how al-Zawahiri came to

be in Bangladesh, or whether he's still there. However, a

source in the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence

(dgfi), a Bangladeshi military intelligence agency, told

TIME that al-Zawahiri is believed to have left Bangladesh

this summer, crossing over the eastern border into Burma

with Rohingya rebels. U.S. intelligence, however, has no

evidence this report is true.

As for the Mecca, its passengers' plans remained a mystery.

One military source says most of the men stayed in

Bangladesh rather than merely transiting, although he adds

it was not clear whether the group sought only refuge or

planned to establish a new base of operations. On Sept. 24,

a fuller picture finally began to emerge when Bangladesh's

domestic intelligence agency arrested four Yemenis, an

Algerian, a Libyan and a Sudanese at three houses in the

upper-crust district of Uttara in Dhaka. Bangladeshi

intelligence sources said they received information from

"several" foreign agencies that the men -- Abu Nujaid of

Libya, Sadek Al Nassami, Abu Sallam, Abu Umaiya and Abul

Abbas of Yemen, Abul Ashem of Algeria and Hassan Adam of

Sudan -- were involved in militant arms training at a

madrasah in the capital run by a Saudi-backed charity, al-

Haramain. In September, Indonesia's al-Qaeda supersnitch

Omar al-Faruq told the CIA that al-Haramain was the

foundation used to channel bin Laden's money to him from

the Middle East. An American expert in the region concurs

that branches of the ultraconservative foundation have

funded terrorism around the world -- a fact that earned two

al-Haramain foreign offices a blacklisting by Washington in

March -- although probably without the knowledge of al-

Haramain's headquarters in Riyadh. "Disreputable folks have

penetrated al-Haramain and used its offices, funds and

personnel for nefarious purposes," he says.

The seven al-Haramain members were questioned by

interrogators from domestic intelligence, police and the

DGFI. Bangladeshi agents also fanned out across the country

to investigate al-Haramain's 37 other branches, which

promptly ceased operations. Although Bangladeshi

intelligence sources confirmed the suspects were being

questioned about links to al-Qaeda, they cautioned that no

relationship with bin Laden's terror network had been

discovered, nor any evidence of training. They added that

the men had been in Bangladesh for three years and were

also being interrogated over allegations of child

trafficking. Sources within Bangladesh's intelligence

community, however, told TIME the authorities had been

embarrassed not to find any evidence at al-Haramain's five-

story offices in Dhaka and were trying to play down the

raid. They said the passports and entry stamps indicating

that the seven arrested men entered Bangladesh in 1999 were

most likely fakes. Whatever the case, after being held for

five days at a secret location, the men were driven to

court and released on Sept. 29. No charges or proceedings

were brought. After they were freed from custody, the seven

were driven to Dhaka's Sheraton hotel where they spent the

night, and then disappeared. TIME's HUJI source claimed the

trafficking story was merely an official smoke screen.

"These are the same guys from the Mecca," he said. "These

are bin Laden's people. They've been hiding here for

several months."

Bangladesh, it is true, is no Afghanistan, or even

Pakistan. For centuries, Bengalis have been united by a

culture of tolerance that defies the familiar South Asian

divide between Hindu and Muslim. After Sept. 11, the CIA

did set up a new five-man base in Dhaka, but merely as part

of a global policy of establishing a presence in all Muslim

countries. The American intelligence community's view is

summed up by one U.S. source who told TIME that Bangladesh

is "not a real hot account." But Bangladesh also has its

fundamentalists. And its southern coastal hills and

northern borders with India are lawless and bristling with

Islamic militants armed by gunrunners en route from

Cambodia and southern Thailand to Sri Lanka, Kashmir,

Central Asia and the Middle East.

Today, southern Bangladesh has become a haven for hundreds

of jihadis on the lam. They find natural allies in Muslim

guerrillas from India hiding out across the border, and in

Muslim Rohingyas, tens of thousands of whom fled the ethnic

and religious suppression of the Burmese military junta in

the late 1970s and 1980s. Many Rohingyas are long-term

refugees, but some are trained to cause trouble back home

in camps tolerated by a succession of Bangladeshi

governments. The original facilities date back to 1975,

making them Asia's oldest jihadi training camps. And one

former Burmese guerrilla who visits the camps regularly

describes three near Ukhia, south of the town of Cox's

Bazar, as able to accommodate a force of 2,500 between

them. The biggest, he claims, has 26 interconnected bunkers

complete with kitchens, lecture halls, telephones and

televisions concealed beneath a three-meter-high false

forest floor that stretches between two hills. Weapons

available for training there include AK-47s, heavy machine

guns, rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and

mortars. Mantraps and mines, which can be triggered by

spotters hiding in tree houses, protect approaches to the

camp.

Over the years, the former guerrilla says, Ukhia has hosted

militant visitors from the southern Philippines, Indonesia,

southern Thailand, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even

Uzbekistan and Chechnya. Videotapes showing al-Qaeda in

training that were unearthed by CNN in August include

footage from 1990 that feature Rohingya rebels. And one of

the five signatories to bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998 call for

a jihad against America was Fazjul Rahman, who signed in

the name of "the Jihad movement of Bangladesh." Fighters

trained and given new identities in Bangladesh also

regularly find their way to conflicts in Afghanistan and

Kashmir. Indian intelligence says the Islamic hijackers of

an Indian Airlines plane with 189 passengers and crew on

board, which they forced to fly from Kathmandu to Kandahar

in December 1999, had traveled to Nepal from Bangladesh.

"With the right amount of money, whoever you are, you can

do anything," says one Western diplomat based in Dhaka. "If

150 militants want to come in here and buy themselves new

passports and new identities, stock up on any weapons they

might want and maybe do a little refresher training before

heading off again, there's nothing to stop them." Indeed,

December was a repeat visit for the Mecca, according to the

HUJI source. In June 2001, he says the boat sailed from

Karachi to Chittagong with 50 other militants who had

completed their training in bin Laden's camps in

Afghanistan.

The Bangladeshi government typically reacts with fury to

reports of jihadi camps or fundamentalism within its

borders. The reason isn't hard to fathom. In October 2001

two Islamic fundamentalist parties with a history of links

to terror groups were elected as part of a four-way

electoral alliance led by Prime Minister Begum Khaleda

Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The accession of

Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote to power in

Bangladesh rang alarm bells. Islamic Oikya Jote is open

about its sympathies: it is well known for its support of

Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The

party's membership largely duplicates that of the HUJI,

which was founded in 1992 by Bangladeshi mujahedin

returning from Afghanistan with orders from bin Laden to

turn the moderate Islamic state into a nation of true

believers. The HUJI has been involved in scores of

bombings, including two attempted assassinations of then

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in July 2000. And while Jamaat

now projects a moderate face, its student wing Islami

Chhatra Shibir has been behind a string of bomb attacks and

killings. At gatherings during the campaign, Jamaat leaders

spoke of breathing the "Islamic spirit of jihad" into the

armed forces while supporters rallied around posters of bin

Laden and the HUJI slogan: AMRA SOBAI HOBO TALIBAN, BANGLA

HOBE AFGHANISTAN. ("We will all be Taliban and Bangladesh

will be Afghanistan.")

Jamaat is also the main force behind the phenomenal growth

of unlicensed madrasahs, known as qaumi madrasahs, in the

past decade. There are now an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 in

Bangladesh, of which 30 to 40, run by mujahedin veterans,

are known to shelter militants and recruit fresh fighters.

Such militants sometimes receive explicit encouragement

from Bangladesh's spiritual leaders. Mullah Obaidul Haque,

head of the national mosque in Dhaka and a Jamaat

associate, told a gathering of thousands in the capital

last December: "America and Bush must be destroyed. The

Americans will be washed away if Bangladesh's 120 million

Muslims spit on them." So controversial were the BNP's

partners in government and so infuriating did they find

reports of rising fundamentalism that earlier this year Zia

twice denied that there were any "Taliban" in her

government, or even in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi

government official tells TIME that while Zia's

administration is aware of the fundamentalist threat inside

the country, tackling it head-on might trigger a violent

backlash. Foreign Minister Morshed Khan took the same line,

telling TIME that it was better to have such groups inside

the government, looking out.

Al-Qaeda's links to the leadership of Jamaat or Islamic

Oikya Jote may be largely rhetorical. But the DGFI,

Bangladesh's military intelligence service, may have more

to hide. Its agents maintain contact with their

counterparts in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and

have a long history of supporting rebels fighting Indian

rule across the border, including providing safe houses in

Dhaka for the leaders of the United Liberation Front for

Assam (ULFA). The HUJI source and the portworkers who saw

the Mecca arrive claim that the man who greeted the new

arrivals was a major in the DGFI. The major checked the

visitors in by name and led them to a fleet of suvs lined

up on the docks, add the portworkers. A spokesman for the

DGFI denied knowing that members of al-Qaeda had ever set

foot in Bangladesh. He even denied that the major existed,

although diplomatic registration records show the officer

is a long-standing member of the service and was stationed

in Calcutta in the mid-1990s. The HUJI source and a

Bangladeshi military source maintain the major was the last

link in an operation that began in Afghanistan. After

leaving the Taliban's headquarters in Kandahar as the city

fell in early December and crossing into Pakistan, the

fugitives traveled to Karachi, hired the Mecca and made the

sail around India.

The emergence of al-Qaeda in Dhaka is merely the latest

sign that Bangladesh's more radical Islamic groups are

coming out from the forests. The former Burmese rebel says

three of the camps near Cox's Bazar have closed since

October -- not because of the kind of governmental pressure

being applied in Pakistan, but because the militants feel

safe enough to transfer their operations to like-minded

madrasahs, some of them in the capital. On May 9 and 10, 63

representatives of nine Islamic groups -- including

Rohingya forces, the Islamic Oikya Jote and the ULFA -- met

in Ukhia to form the Bangladesh Islamic Manch, a united

council under HUJI's leadership. So far, the Manch has

restricted itself to circulating speeches by bin Laden and

Mullah Masood Azhar, a Pakistani militant leader. But it

has big plans, says the HUJI source: "The dream is to

create a larger Islamic land than the territorial limits of

Bangladesh to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal

and Burma's Arakan province." That dream, if Islamic

terrorists are allowed to continue their operations in

Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the rest of the

region.

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington, Simon

Elegant/Jakarta and Scott Macleod/Cairo

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