Passports, IDs sale: This man Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani

Ahmed Ghailani, whose photo appears in the counterfeit identification documents, is the first former Guantanamo Bay detainee to have been tried in a civilian court.
He was charged and found guilty of conspiracy for his role in the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Ghailani was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004 and handed over to the US at the beginning of 2005 – he pleaded not guilty in June 2009 to charges of conspiring to commit the embassy bombings.
According to a transcript of a closed-door hearing in March 2007, Ghailani admitted delivering explosives used to blow up the US embassy in Tanzania in 1998.
However, he said he did not know about the attack beforehand and apologised to the US government and the victims’ families, the transcript said.
The near-simultaneous bombings in August 1998 killed 213 people in Nairobi and 11 people in Dar es Salaam as well as injuring thousands more. Twelve Americans were among the dead.
He is thought to have been born on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar and is said to speak fluent Kiswahili and English.
He was number eight on the FBI’s Most Wanted List with a $5 million bounty on his head.
Prosecutors alleged that he had bought the truck that carried the bomb used in the Dar es Salaam attack. Analysts described Ghailani as a very important figure, who was probably sent to East Africa at the time of the bombings by Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri.
At the time of his arrest, Pakistani officials his capture was the most significant since the detention in March 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
A Guantanamo Bay detention file from whistleblower website Wikileaks says Ghailani is a senior al-Qaeda operative and was a facilitator in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Additionally, he attended basic militant training and is classified as ‘a high risk individual likely to pose a threat to US interests and allies.”
Ghailani is currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole in an American prison.


 

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