'Traitor' warns of new attack on US

The United States sent more intelligence officers to a desert prison in Afghanistan yesterday to interrogate a Californian hip-hop fan-turned Taliban guerrilla who says that America faces a new terrorist attack within days.

John Walker, the 20-year-old son of a well-to-do lawyer from San Anselmo, California, is said to have told CIA officers that the next phase of al-Qaida's war will take the form of a biological strike after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends on Sunday.

Phase three, the holy warrior from the redwood groves of Marin county has told sceptical intelligence officials, will be the destruction of the US.

Dismissing his claims, US officials last night described Mr Walker as merely a foot soldier within the Taliban, and said that he was most probably passing on rumours he had overheard in the Taliban trenches.

His parents have received a letter from him, his first contact with them since he slipped into Afghanistan seven months ago and made his way to an al-Qaida training camp. "Dear mama and papa", it says, "I apologise for not contacting you in such a long time. I realise this must have caused you a lot of grief.

"I am currently alive and well in Afghanistan and I am in safe hands. I cannot give you many details about my situation, but it would be good to hear from you all."

The letter is signed "John Lindh", Mr Walker having apparently ditched his mother's surname for that of his father during the past few days of captivity in a shipping container at Camp Rhino, near Kandahar.

He often changed names during an adolescent search for identity that took him from 14-year-old hip-hop fan to a 16-year-old convert to Islam, to a 20-year-old Taliban soldier, bearded, his long hair lank, and a bullet wound in one leg.

On internet postings that trace his transformation, he was variously John Lindh, John Doe, Disciple of the Englober, Hine E Craque, Professor J, Br Suleyman Al-Mujahid and Mr Mujahid, among others. To the Taliban, he was Abdul Hamid.

Now debate swings back and forth as the homeland he chose to take up arms against attempts to arrive at its own definition of his identity: is John Walker a traitor or a mixed-up kid?

In 1995, he was a music fan pretending to be black. "When I read those rhymes of yours I got the idea you were a 13-year-old white kid playing smart," he told a hapless wordsmith in a message on an internet news group before slipping into new skin to authority to his critique. "That whole rhyme was saying all black people should just stop being black and that'll solve all our problems. Our blackness does not make white people hate us, it is their racism that causes the hate."

But soon he was casting off the accessories of teen America. He sold his synthesizers, offloaded his collection of more than 200 records and switched his focus to books about Islam, Palestine, freemasonry and brain-washing. By July 1996, he had converted to Islam after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. He expanded his assault on popular culture late in 1997, coupling it with disapproval of the activities of some of the followers of his new faith.

"It seems quite unusual to have a Muslim convention at a theme park owned by Disney, whose producers are full of kaffir mythology, magic, occultism, sexism, racism and homosexuality. Isn't this the same theme park that sponsored 'gay day' this year?"

Little more than 12 months later, the "sweet and shy" son of Frank Lindh and his estranged wife Marilyn was on his way to study in Lebanon, then Pakistan. Last spring, not four years since he sold his record collection, Walker/ Doodoo/Hamid struck out for Afghanistan and further education with al-Qaida.