Editor’s note: since al-Qaeda and its allied forces claim that pornography is sinful, and that Westerners are obsessed and debased by it, isn’t a flash drive which appears to contain pornography the very first object immoral investigators would examine while conducting a search? Apparently Germany’s intellligence and law enforcement agencies aren’t so easily distracted. From CNN’s Documents give new details on al Qaeda’s London bombings
This story is based on a 46-page internal al Qaeda document, details of which were obtained by CNN. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official told CNN that U.S. authorities have concluded it was written by British al Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf. It was discovered by German cryptologists, along with more than 100 other documents, embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk belonging to a suspected al Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last May. The German newspaper Die Zeit was the first to report on the documents.
(CNN) — Rashid Rauf was one of al Qaeda’s most capable planners, a British citizen who operated for years in Pakistan and planned some of the terror group’s most ambitious attacks. And he wrote about them in great detail.
Rauf’s detailed analysis — meant for al Qaeda’s senior leadership — shows he was intimately involved in planning the devastating attack on the London transport system in 2005, and tells the inside story of the planning for that attack and another that failed just weeks later.
Rauf’s notes were part of a treasure trove of al Qaeda documents discovered by German authorities that CNN recently obtained access to.
More: Future plots | Liquid bomb plot origins
On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers led by Mohammed Siddique Khan, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, killed 52 people on three London subway trains and a bus.
CNN’s coverage, including references to the relevant earlier events, is outstanding, and provides critical context via internal and external links on well-designed and easily navigable pages, including photographs coverage and video clips. Start with this link, CNN’s Documents give new details on al Qaeda’s London bombings (identical to the first link above).
See also plus the Telegraph’s Al-Qaeda commander’s guide to beating MI5, also with excellent links to relevant prior and parallel coverage, by Duncan Gardham, without whom we. likely would have missed the CNN coverage. Mr. Gardham is
The Daily Telegraph’s Investigations Correspondent. He has specialised in writing about international terrorism and espionage. Duncan has covered all the major al-Qaeda plots in Britain including the fertiliser bomb plot, the July 7 and July 21 bombings, the London and Glasgow car bombs, the trans-Atlantic airlines plot and the Manchester shopping centre plot. He has also written about counter-terrorism policy and international developments such as the death of Osama bin Laden.
We’ve been remiss in neither keeping up with his work nor directing our readers’ attention to it. An archive of his work for The Daily Telegraph can be found at this link: Duncan Gardham.