The Mumbai connection

Was young Mohammad Afroz from Trombay part of the terrorists' plans for September 11?

MOHAMMAD AFROZ was watching television in an airport lounge in London on September 11 when news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York began to come in. Soon afterwards, he was told that his afternoon flight to Manchester had been cancelled and that the airport had been shut down. If the 25-year-old Mumbai resident's confession before the Mumbai police and the Intelligence Bureau (I.B) interrogators is true, this development was not just a minor inconvenience. Along with four other accomplices, Afroz had planned to hijack the Manchester-bound flight and then crash it into the Westminster Palace that houses the British Parliament, in London.

A month after his arrest from a Mumbai hotel, Afroz' story continues to perplex the Indian intelligence community. If the account - that has led to Afroz being charged on December 5 with waging war against the state - is correct, it would suggest that there were multiple aircraft bombing cells in place on September 11, each with separate targets and each ignorant of the existence of the other. Although on December 5 Union Home Minister L.K. Advani announced that he had been "able to confirm" Afroz' confessional statements, key facts remain ambiguous. Informed sources told Frontline that Afroz faced his questioning with finesse, giving just enough information to whet the appetites of his interrogators, and then pulling himself back, using guile and evasion with the practised ease of an intelligence professional.

Weeks of sustained interrogation produced only the barest contours of Afroz' activities. In 1997, sponsored by his London-based maternal uncle Mubarak Musalman, Afroz joined Mistry Aviation, a training institute based in Mumbai's Mazgaon area and run by a retired Air-India pilot. That summer, he left for training at an institute working out of the Moorabbin Airport in Victoria, Australia. In an e-mail to Frontline, the manager of the Royal Victorian Aero Club, Joseph Ferlazzo, confirmed that a photograph sent to him by this correspondent by e-mail was "that of Afroz, who was training at the Australian College of Aviation Flying School in Melbourne, 1997-1998". Ferlazzo's mail said Afroz received his restricted licence, a basic permit, on a second attempt, and described the student as "quiet spoken and well presented". The current cost for a commercial pilot's course at the institute, according to its web site, is approximately Australian $22,470.

It was in Victoria, Afroz told his interrogators, that he was first recruited for the plot. A group of 31 South and West Asian flying students used to meet regularly at the al-Taqwa mosque, part of the local Werribee Islamic Centre. Afroz says two of the hijackers of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 from Kathmandu in 1999, Shahid Akhtar and Zahoor Ahmad Mistry, whom he knew as 'Sandy' and 'Zia', were in this group. At the centre, a West Asian preacher, Maulana Mansoor Ilyas, sketched out the contours of the plot to a select group of committed cadre. Three targets were selected. The first was the Rialto twin towers in Melbourne, a 55-floor, 253-metre structure claimed to be the tallest in the southern hemisphere. The other targets were the Westminster Palace, and Parliament House in New Delhi.

THE story becomes more opaque from this point onward. According to Afroz, four groups of five pilots selected by Ilyas were told to acquire higher levels of flight training, of the kind that would allow them to fly commercial jets. Ilyas himself seemed to know not a little about aviation, guiding the young students through detailed pilot's charts of their proposed targets. After spending some time back in Mumbai, Afroz left India again in 1999, this time for a month-long course at the Tyler International School of Aviation in Texas, United States. The Tyler School is a premier institution, with fees for commercial pilots training running from $24,800 to $27,800. By some intelligence accounts, Mistry and Akhtar also attended the Tyler School shortly before the hijacking of IC-814.

At the end of his time at the Tyler School, Afroz again returned to India, spending several months with his family, evidently making no effort to look for a job. In May 2000, his passport entries show, he made a brief visit to Hong Kong - to meet Ilyas. They met at the Pakistan Hotel, a downmarket establishment frequented by budget travellers from South Asia. In July that year, Afroz was again sent for a training course, this time at the top-flight Cabair College of Air Training at the Cranfield Airport near Bedford in the United Kingdom. The Cabair College, which trains pilots for several commercial airlines, charges a hefty 47,235 for its Integrated Professional Airline Pilot's course, which enables candidates to fly large passenger jets. In an e-mail to Frontline, Cabair chief executive Graham Austin confirmed that Afroz had indeed studied at the institute.

Intelligence officials say that the real problem with Afroz' narrative is its lack of detail. For one, while his fees were paid directly to the aviation schools, Afroz offered no clear picture of just who met his day-to-day expenses. He claimed he used a credit card in Australia, but fumbled when asked just how he made his card payments. Nor could he remember the names of his landlords at his lodgings in Claremont Avenue in Victoria. Again, Afroz recalled one meeting with a group of seven other cadre at the Mumtaz Palace Hotel in Bedford, but has given contradictory accounts of their names, and the details of his discussions. And if Afroz is to be believed, Ilyas ran the operation in a loose and unprofessional manner. Bar the single meeting in Hong Kong, he maintained telephonic contact, oblivious to the need to brief and motivate his terrorist cell constantly. Of Ilyas' possible links with Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, Afroz claims to know nothing.

By the time final orders were given for the hijacking of the London-Manchester flight on September 11, Afroz and his colleagues were, however, ready for the operation. Final orders had been issued by Ilyas on September 9, Afroz says, and tickets were purchased the same afternoon. But, the groups that hijacked the four planes in the U.S. jumped the gun by just minutes. Now without clear instructions on the next move, Afroz returned to India. He did not inform his family of his arrival, and chose instead to stay at cheap hotels in suburban Mumbai. By some accounts, the event that led to his arrest was an affair with a bar attendant in Navi Mumbai which led to a drunken altercation. Navi Mumbai Police Inspector Ansar Peerzadeh promptly arrested the young man, little realising just whom he had picked up. It took the Mumbai Police's Crime Branch-II almost a month to find out who Afroz in fact was.

PERHAPS unsurprisingly, Afroz' family members dispute almost all elements of the police's claims. They are also furious that the Mumbai police have pinned Afroz with secondary charges of burglary, an evident ploy to secure his custody for a longer period of time. But their pleas of Afroz innocence leave several questions unanswered. For one, his father and brother deny he had trained as a pilot anywhere other than in Mumbai, a claim that flies in the face of facts. Nor are they able to say who paid for Afroz' pilot training abroad, and why he never sought a job in India. Other questions also remain. Why did his family never seek to ascertain just what he was doing abroad? And, why did he not tell his family of his return to India in September?

Afroz' background, however, gives some insight into his possible motivation. The son of a poor tailor, Abdul Razzaq, he studied upto the 12th standard. While his brother Mohammad Farooq worked hard and built up a profitable business as a customs clearing agent, Afroz was drawn to politics. In the wake of the genocidal anti-Muslim riots of 1992-1993, Afroz flirted with the Students' Islamic Movement of India, then a perfectly legal organisation.

As for his recruitment in Australia, it is worth noting that plans for the use of aircraft as bombs have been around since at least 1993. Documents recovered from Pakistani national Ramzi Yusuf, who set off a 1,500-kg urea-nitrate bomb in a vehicle in the basement of the World Trade Centre in February 1993, showed that his group had been planning to crash a chemical-laden jet into the Pentagon the following year, as well as to hijack simultaneously 11 commercial jets over the Pacific.

What is less easy to explain is the conduct of Western intelligence agencies. I.B. officials say that repeated requests for assistance over the past month have been stonewalled, some on the basis of points as inconsequential as who had sponsored Afroz' visa applications. Officials from the Australian and British police services arrived in Mumbai to question Afroz in late December, weeks after his arrest, while U.S. authorities maintained a studied disinterest in the affair. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and the U.K. have not sought to question the dozens of suspects in their countries whose names have surfaced in the course of the Afroz affair. This is in stark contrast to past form, even in cases where Western intelligence had doubts about the credibility of Indian police claims. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials had, for example, played an active role in the investigations into an attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi in early 2001 by Sudanese national Abdul Rauf Hawas. FBI officials even flew in lie detector equipment for Lashkar-e-Toiba activist Syed Abdul Nasir, who had been tasked to blow up U.S. consulates in Chennai and Kolkata in 1999. "This disinterest is very odd," says a senior Mumbai police official, "particularly since the Americans are picking up hundreds of people and holding them for months on the flimsiest of suspicions."

With media accounts of Afroz' arrest having hit the Western press, it is probable that police organisations in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. will start to show at least some formal interest in the terrorist suspect. On December 7, Australian Prime Minister John Howard finally announced that his government wished to question Afroz. Howard also cast doubt on the Indian investigation's allegations, claiming they could have been "either embellished or fabricated". None of this, however, explains why Australian police, and those of the U.K., showed interest in the issue only after media protests in their countries. Such blase reaction to events this far raises the obvious question: was Western intelligence uninterested in Afroz because of ignorance, or because they knew the story already? In the not-impossible event that Afroz' activities were known all along to Western intelligence, this would suggest at least one conspiracy to bomb prominent targets using commercial jets was under surveillance, even if the most important one slipped through the net. Either Afroz or Ilyas himself, proponents of this theory suggest, could have been working for British or U.S. intelligence. While the claim has no evidence to support it, it does explain the ease with which Afroz was able to obtain finances and visas - and his reluctance to explain the details of just how he paid for his time abroad.

Either way, it is clear that the whole story of September 11 is still far from being told: the tragic events of that morning may turn out to be even more layered and complex than anyone can yet imagine.