Bombings: ex-sergeant pleads guilty

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, OCT. 21. In what is seen as a major victory for prosecutors and investigators, a former U.S. Army Sergeant has pleaded guilty to conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the American embassy bombings of Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. ``Among the targets I did surveillance for was the American embassy in Nairobi,'' Mr. Ali Mohammed told a judge in New York.

Mr. Mohammed has also gone on record saying that he had briefed Osama in 1993 after going over American, British, French and Israeli targets in Kenya. ``Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy (in Nairobi) and pointed to where the truck could go in as a suicide bomber.''

A naturalised American citizen, Mr. Mohammed was from Egypt; and was discharged from the Army in 1989 after he had served for three years. In court papers, Mr. Muhammad also said that he had trained Osama's Al Qaeda network and that he had also arranged a meeting between Osama and the head of the Hizbollah group in Sudan. The involvement of Mr. Mohammed with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had started prior to his joining the U.S. army, it was said.

Mr. Mohammed will be charged on five criminal felony counts and is expected to go on trial starting January. The charges include murder, kidnapping, and conspiring to destroy American defence facilities. The U.S. has warrants out for at least 11 others in the embassy bombings of 1998 that killed 223 persons. One of the persons sought is Osama; and Afghanistan is under pressure to turn him over either directly or through a third country.

The direct implication of Osama in the Africa embassy bombings comes at a time when the Clinton administration has said in plain terms that the Saudi fugitive is one of the top suspects in the blast of the USS Cole in the Port of Aden last week that killed 17 sailors. From the President, Mr. Bill Clinton, down there has been the message that justice will be served and that the perpetrators of the attack will be tracked down.

The guilty pleading has not materially changed the nature and scope of the USS Cole investigations. According to the Director of the FBI, Mr. Louis Freeh, it was early to narrow the suspect list. But the President of Yemen has said that some of the suspects who have been detained in his country belong to the Egyptian al Jihad whose leader is a top aide of Osama.

Meanwhile, the Navy has altered the sequence of events leading to the attack on the USS Cole. It now says that the destroyer was moored and in the process of refuelling when a small boat filled with explosives rammed it on the side last week. Earlier, the assertion was that the small boat had been a part of the mooring team and hence difficult to detect that something was amiss.

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