Former Liberian president Charles Taylor sold conflict diamonds to known al-Qaeda operatives that may have been used to finance the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, according to a confidential report from the UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone.
"It is clear that al-Qaeda had been in west Africa since September 1998 and maintained a continuous presence in the area through 2002," said the document, produced by the office of prosecutor David Crane.
The document, gleaned from press reports, witnesses to sightings of al-Qaeda operatives in Liberia and interviews with a single, unnamed source, is the latest effort to link the global terror network to conflict diamonds mined during the civil war that ravaged the west African state for a decade.
But more tellingly, according to Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah, who first revealed many of the links between Taylor and the terror group, it shows the flagrant intelligence shortfalls in truly understanding al-Qaeda's connections to Africa.
"The United States has not perceived itself to have a strategic interest in sub-Saharan Africa on the terrorism front until very recently," Farah said in an Aug. 5 interview with allAfrica.com.
"The development not only in Liberia of a functioning criminal state is not a secret to anyone who has been to the region or who lives in the region. The whole scenario is part of the neglect by the outside world," Farah said.
What it is not, said former US ambassador to Sierra Leone Joseph Melrose, is a smoking gun.
"You can't say it hasn't happened, but you can't prove evidence in court because it is circumstantial evidence," he told reporters by telephone from Pennsylvania.
"But there is a long tradition in the diamond sector [of shady dealings] and they have to acknowledge that some of these blood diamonds could be terror diamonds," he said.
Taylor, a warlord who rose to the presidency in 1997 after a seven-year rebellion, is at the center of the intricate relations between al-Qaeda and Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels.
Citing the watchdog group Global Witness, the document states that Taylor's government "facilitated access for al-Qaeda operatives into Sierra Leone and Liberia in exchange for diamonds and weapons."
According to US officials quoted in an Aug. 4 article by the Boston Globe, Taylor was also paid protection money by al-Qaeda operatives, among them Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian national who was arrested on July 25 in Pakistan after a blazing gunbattle.
Ghailani, a key planner in Osama bin Laden's network, is accused of masterminding the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
The court dossier alleges he met several times in 1999 with Taylor at his residence in Monrovia, around the time of an armed uprising to rid Liberia of Taylor that finally ended in August last year.
Another top al-Qaeda player with connections to Liberia is Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a senior financial officer included on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted list.
Witnesses told The Washington Post that he arrived in Liberia in September 2000 and established a good relationship with Ibrahim Bah, a top RUF commander who served as a go-between between the RUF leadership and Taylor.
The dossier's most voluble source, who remains unidentified, said that it was Bah who arranged for Abdullah to buy millions of dollars worth of diamonds from Taylor that had been mined in Sierra Leone.
Those diamonds were smuggled out through channels arranged by Taylor or Samih Ossaily and Aziz Nassour, both of whom are in custody in Belgium awaiting trial for their shady dealings in Sierra Leone.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS