Architect of New York's day of terror

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad never ran from his pursuers. He hid in plain sight. Partly this was arrogance, the conceit of a man who had operated at the top levels of international terrorism for more than a decade. But it was also due to faith and a twisted world view. Mohammad felt, and no doubt still feels, himself to be one of the elect, part of the vanguard tasked by God to organise a wave of terror designed to rouse the Muslim community and precipitate an apocalyptic global conflict between the forces of belief and unbelief.

He was born in Kuwait in 1964 or 1965 and raised in Fahaheel, a booming oil town south of Kuwait city packed with foreign workers. His family appear to have been religious and his older brother, Zahed, was the leader of the Kuwait university branch of the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group. Mohammad went to a modern and relatively secular school. He was a studious boy and good at science.

Like many other wealthy Middle Eastern men at the time, he travelled to the US for his further education. After a year learning English in North Carolina, Mohammad enrolled in an engineering course at the state university. In 1986 he graduated and headed to the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar where his brother was running a large Kuwaiti charity. Peshawar was the base for the thousands of Arab militants fighting alongside the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet forces then occupying Afghanistan. Mohammad was not a soldier. He was an organiser and a leader. In 1989, the year the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the Arab 'international brigade' began to look for new targets, Mohammad was teaching engineering at the University of Dawa, which doubled as a military training base. The Mohammad brothers were very much part of the local militant community, worshipping at the mosque where Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was to become Osama bin Laden's deputy in the al-Qaeda group, often preached. Though al-Qaeda was formed around this period there is no evidence that Mohammad was a member, or even close to bin Laden, at this time.

In 1992 Mohammad moved to Karachi, posing as a businessman. In fact he acted as a fundraiser. His main role was as an intermediary between wealthy militant sympathisers in the Gulf and the young men who had flocked to Pakistan and, though prepared to launch terror attacks, lacked resources. One of these young men was his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who, in 1993, launched the first attack on the World Trade Centre in New York with a massive truck bomb that caused massive damage and many casualties but failed to topple the twin towers. A year later Yousef was involved in a plot to kill Benazir Bhutto, then the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Mohammad is thought to have provided the funding for the attack, which failed when the bomb detonated prematurely, injuring Ramzi and alerting guards.

Mohammad next surfaced in the Philippines. According to local intelligence, Mohammad was in Manila at the same time as Ramzi. The exact relationship between the two, like so many things about Khalid Mohammad, is unclear, though it was clearly close. When a fire in a bomb laboratory forced Ramzi to flee the Philippines Mohammad left too. Subsequent interrogations of Yousef and other accomplices revealed that a series of plots were being planned. They included the simultaneous bombing of up to a dozen passenger jets in South Asia and an attempt to kill the Pope on a visit to Manila. Ramzi fled back to Pakistan where he was apprehended in early 1995 in a raid on a small guesthouse in Islamabad, the capital.

It possible that Mohammad had accompanied him back to Pakistan. The register at the guesthouse reveals that one of the guests present when Ramzi was seized by the FBI was a Karachi-based businessman who had signed in under the name of Khalid Mohammad. No one paid him any attention. He was hiding in plain sight.

Shaikh then made his way to Doha, the capital of the Gulf state of Qatar, where he had powerful friends in the government. For a year he was a guest of the Qatari Minister for Religious Affairs and spent his time raising funds among wealthy and devout businessmen in the Gulf. He travelled widely and made little attempt to hide his operations. Using his charm and contacts Mohammad pumped wealthy Islamic businessmen and politicians for donations for Islamic causes.

Everyone involved knew that the money was not going to build mosques but they were happy to give huge sums. Mohammad funnelled the cash to the hundreds of militants around the world who were keen to obtain resources to conduct their own personal jihads. He was still yet to join forces with bin Laden.

American investigators have tracked his movements through Italy, Egypt, Singapore, Jordan, Thailand and the Philippines. He may even have come to the UK. When the FBI tried to arrest him in Qatar in 1996 he was tipped off by senior government officials and fled to Afghanistan, about the only place where he knew he would be safe. Only then did he offer his contacts, fundraising experience and organisational ability to al-Qaeda. Bin laden and his aides, who had arrived back in Afghanistan from the Sudan in May of that year, were happy to have such a senior militant figure with them.

Over the next five years Mohammad established himself as a key part of bin Laden's team. In late 1999, al-Qaeda and its various associated groups collectively took the broad strategy decision to strike mainland America. Previously attacks, such as that in 1998 on the US embassies in east Africa, had focused on American interests overseas. Mohammad was one of the key aides left to sort out the details of the new policy, picking and choosing from the plans that were being put to him by volunteers from all over the world and suggesting to others ideas of his own. Among the volunteers who approached him were a group of militants who were based in Germany. They were bright young men, at ease in Western society and with an interest in engineering and aeronautics. They were perfect material to execute Mohammad's favourite, and most ambitious, scheme: the destruction of the World Trade Centre with hijacked planes.

Over the next two years Mohammad carefully watched the plan mature. He selected new personnel and dispatched them to Germany and America. He kept a watchful eye on the core members of the group who were training as pilots.

During the US-led bombing of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 Mohammad left bin Laden and escaped, with thousands of other militants, into Pakistan's seething cities. He was soon active again, working his contacts, recruiting, building networks. In May 2002 a young Tunisian drifter detonated a truck bomb outside a synagogue in Tunis, killing more than a dozen tourists. The last call the bomber made was to Mohammad. With bin Laden and al Zawahiri holed up in the mountains of the Pakistani-Afghan frontier, and the Jordanian Palestinian operative Abu Zubaydah in jail, Mohammad became the de facto operative head of al-Qaeda.

In July he gave an extraordinary interview in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi to an Arab journalist in which he boasted of his role in the September 11 attacks. Alongside him as he spoke was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the key members of the Hamburg hijackers cell. In September bin al Shibh, his location given away by a careless telephone call, was captured after a shoot out with Pakistani police. But Mohammad, the raid's real target, escaped.

But he did not flee from his pursuers but towards them. In an incredible display of hubris and daring he moved north, to Rawalpindi, the sprawling, stinking city just five miles from Islamabad itself. His new base was a nondescript suburban villa in the West Ridge area. It was there that he was captured.

His days of hiding in plain sight are over.