(Times-UK) Dan McDougall - Al-Qaeda is now back in Yemen in significant numbers and the organization is flourishing. Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi national, spent six years as a prisoner at Guantanamo. In December 2007, he was released into the custody of the Saudi government's "deradicalization" program for terrorists. After his release in 2008, he crossed the border into Yemen and began putting into place the building blocks for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed responsibility for the botched suicide bomb attack on a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day. By September 2008, al-Shihri had hooked up with two notorious terrorists who had escaped from Yemeni jails. Nasir al-Wahayshi was a former secretary to Osama Bin Laden, and Jamal Muhammad Ahmad al-Badawi was the convicted mastermind of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 American sailors off Yemen in October 2000. Their ranks have been swelled by at least three other former Guantanamo detainees. Last week Pentagon sources admitted that 61 former prisoners at the camp have returned to the battlefield. Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, believes Yemen has now become the third-largest haven for al-Qaeda.
2010-01-04 08:35:56Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive