A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar "began co-operating even before his arrest", has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004.
Babar facilitated the London bombers' knowledge of bomb-making when he invited around a dozen British jihadists to attend a camp that he had helped set up in north-west Pakistan in the summer of 2003.
In a debriefing with US law enforcement agents in 2004, Babar told US prosecutors about Khan, whom he knew as "Ibrahim". British terrorism investigators showed Babar an unclear surveillance photo of Khan in August 2004, but Babar failed to identify him.
He has said that when he saw pictures of Khan in newspapers after the bombings he alerted the US authorities straight away: "I told them [the American authorities] that was the person that was Ibrahim. I had mentioned Ibrahim before July 2005."
After his guilty plea in 2004, Babar spent a good proportion of his four and a half years outside the regular prison system. He flew to testify in trials in the UK and in Canada and met law enforcement officers from around the world.
Court transcripts.
The 7/7 question that remained unanswered.
It is after September 2001 that Babar's story begins to fray at the edges. What kind of person would fly to Pakistan to support the Taliban just after an al-Qaida operation nearly killed their own mother? As one lawyer in a 2006 British terrorism trial put to Babar while he was in the witness box: "Someone who does that either is so appalled by the acts of al-Qaida that they are going to go and spy for America on jihadis – or they are a very hardline jihadi indeed."
There are also questions about how he was able to fly from the UK to Pakistan and then on to the US without being stopped or questioned, even though his ITN interview about killing Americans, which offered US security officials plenty of identifying details, had been syndicated on television stations around the world.
During the various trials at which Babar made an appearance, it was also revealed he was able to visit a US consulate in Pakistan many times and apply for a green card for the Pakistani wife he married while on jihad duty in 2002, without a question being asked.
Notice how converts to Islam can be found in most terror plots. Follow the trials of the plotters, those who get the lighter sentences are informants who, most of the time, instigated, trained, and helped terror operations with logistics and more... Was Babar one of the few real Muslims willing to work with the US against other Muslims in such a way teaching them how to plot, bomb and then be caught? Was this the reason why most terror plots had to rely on converts?
UPDATE: Freed NY terrorist advocated violence
Since March 29th 2006
1 comment:
Interesting read
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