US:The alleged al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, boasted of being personally responsible for decapitating US journalist Daniel Pearl five years ago, in a new transcript released by the Pentagon yesterday.
The claim comes on top of 30 other al-Qaeda operations he said he been involved in.
Mohammed (42), a Pakistani brought up in Kuwait, claimed he was the shadowy figure shown in a video of the beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter. "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," the transcript quotes him as saying.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the passage was withheld from 26 pages of his "confession" released on Wednesday to allow time to inform Pearl's wife, Mariane. They also have a son, Adam, born four months after his death.
In the full transcript Mohammed admits responsibility for 31 actual or planned plots, ranging from the attacks on New York to "an operation to destroy Heathrow airport, the Canary Wharf building and Big Ben on British soil".
Former CIA and state department analysts, as well as independent counterterrorism specialists, said yesterday it was feasible that Mohammed had been involved in all the operations he claims, though his links to some may have been tenuous and some plans never went further than being aspirations.
Human rights organisations expressed concern over a reference in the transcript that hinted at torture claims. In the transcript the president of the tribunal, who is from the military but whose name is not disclosed, referred to a written statement, apparently from Mohammed, "regarding alleged abuse or treatment that the detainee received".
In the transcript Mohammed claimed that Pearl, who had been investigating a trip made by Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, to Pakistan, had been working for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
The video of his killing shows a man cutting Pearl's head off. His severed head is then held up by the hair. In the transcript Mohammed says: "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head." Several people have been convicted in Pakistan of the murder and sentenced to death, including British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.
Mohammed is the most senior of 14 detainees at Guantánamo Bay whose secret military hearings began on Saturday to establish whether they can be classified as enemy combatants, which would allow them to be tried in military courts.
The transcript includes a list of his alleged operations that begins with the 1993 World Trade Center attack and is followed by the foiled shoe-bomber aircraft attack, a previously unknown attempt to assassinate former president Jimmy Carter, the Mombasa missile attack on an Israeli aircraft carrying holidaymakers, American, Jewish and British targets in Turkey, and an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the Philippines.
Mohammed admitted to some of these in an interview with al-Jazeera in 2002.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and state department counterterrorist specialist, said yesterday that Mohammed's claims were credible. "He was related to Ramzi Yousef [ who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack]. It is entirely feasible. It goes to show that a guy like this, someone of vision and capability, can create mayhem." He said that the testimony was useless, however. "It does not have the credibility of the Nuremberg trials. That is due to the bungling of the Bush administration." Peter Bergen, the Washington-based author of several books on al-Qaeda, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997, said it was plausible he had been involved in all the operations, describing him as a professional terrorist since 1993. Of the 31 operations, many never took place. This left an average of about two a year, which was feasible.
"This is a guy who seemed to live and breathe it. With his engineering background, this was someone into bomb-making and the technical side." He described him as motivated by Israel and its relationship with the US and not particularly religious.
"I think he was doing it just because it was fun. He seemed to enjoy the thrill of it." John Sifton, a terrorism specialist at Human Rights Watch, said he was more concerned about military custody than the feasibility of his claims.
"The military custody is now backfiring. You have terrorist suspects happily taking on the status of enemy combatants and revelling in it. They should have been transferred to civil courts and treated like other criminals and not as warriors."