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Saturday, October 21, 2000

Cole attack timing is questioned
Navy Revises Detail of Cole Attack
By Robert Burns
Associated Press

Associated Press

A small boat guards the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Investigators have found bomb-making equipment in an apartment near the Yemeni port and believe two former occupants may have executed the suicide bombing.

WASHINGTON - The Navy on Friday revised its account of last week's terrorist attack on the USS Cole in ways that raised new questions about how a small boat could have penetrated security around the $1 billion vessel.
   A Navy statement said the destroyer had tied up at a fuel station in the Yemeni port of Aden nearly two hours before the bombing killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 more Oct. 12.
   The timing was significant because it means the suspected suicide bombers did not, as the Navy originally said, approach the Cole posing as a work boat helping to moor the warship. The blast occurred long afterward, when, given Navy security procedures, armed sailors should have been on the deck scanning the busy harbor for possible threats to their ship.
   Shortly after the disaster, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, told reporters that the Cole crew's "ability to deal with this kind of attack" had been limited by the mooring operation that he said was under way. The Navy said its earlier account had been based on unconfirmed reports from the stricken ship. "As is often the case, these initial relayed reports contained some errors, and in some cases were misunderstood," a statement said.
   When he first briefed reporters, Clark said he was not sure his version was "100 percent accurate." The Navy revised its account after an inquiry by the Navy Times, a private weekly publication. In Friday's edition, the newspaper quoted unnamed sources in Aden as saying that no mooring craft had been near the Cole at the time of the blast.
   The revised Navy timeline came as the Senate Armed Services Committee held a second day of hearings into the attack. Senators are looking into security measures in place around the Cole and the decision to allow U.S. warships to refuel in a country where anti-American extremist groups were known to be active.
   The committee, meeting in closed session Friday, heard testimony from State Department officials, but ended the hearing early after senior Pentagon officials, including Clark, requested more time to prepare their testimony.
   Defense Secretary William Cohen on Thursday named two retired military commanders to head an independent investigation into the bombing, including possible security lapses.
   Yemeni authorities have been working with the FBI to uncover those behind the bloodiest terrorist attack on the U.S. military in the Middle East since a 1996 truck-bombing of the U.S. Air Force housing compound in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 service members.
   Al-Jihad, a radical Islamic group closely associated with Osama bin Laden, the Saudi militant who is accused of waging an international terrorism campaign against the United States, has emerged as a prime suspect in the attack on the Cole, according to U.S. authorities familiar with the investigation.
   On at least one occasion, bin Laden's associates are reported to have used the same high-quality explosive - RDX, short for Research Department Explosive - that the FBI has determined was used in the Cole attack.
   In January 1999, according to India Today, that country's leading newsmagazine, Indian authorities arrested a Bangladeshi national named Sayed Abu Nasir and six associates who allegedly were about to bomb the U.S. consulates in Chennai and Calcutta.
   Nadir was taken into custody with five detonators and 4.4 pounds of RDX. He was involved at that time, according to Indian and Pakistani intelligence authorities cited by India Today, with bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the U.S. and Israel.
   U.S. officials, however, publicly say it is premature to link the bombing of the Cole to bin Laden, who is believed to oversee an amalgam of Islamic extremist groups including al-Jihad from exile in Afghanistan.
   Before the Cole attack, intelligence authorities considered al-Jihad a spent force, crushed by Egyptian security forces several years ago. Its leader, Ayman Zawahri, a former physician, reportedly moved to Afghanistan and is believed to have become bin Laden's chief lieutenant.
   During much of the 1990s, al-Jihad was among Egypt's most dangerous militant Islamic groups.
   Its young, angry recruits bombed government and military sites, warned foreigners to stay out of Egypt and targeted countless political and military officials for assassination.
   In 1981, al-Jihad joined forces with another Egyptian Islamic militant group, al Gamaa al Islamiyah, under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Omar Abdurrahman, the cleric accused of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in New York. The two groups cooperated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
   In 1993, when Egypt was virtually under siege by the militants, al-Jihad nearly assassinated then-Prime Minister Atef Sidki, but instead killed a 6-year-old girl coming out of school, an action that outraged the country and cost the group considerable popular support.
   "Al-Jihad saves its energies for big actions, not just minor killings," said Mohammed al Salah, a journalist with the Arab newspaper al Hayat who has covered al-Jihad and al Gamaa al Islamiyah for years. "They want major assassinations."

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