From Germ Warfare to Restaurateur: The Life of Malaysia’s Yazid Sufaat
From Germ Warfare to Restaurateur: The Life of Malaysia’s Yazid Sufaat
Introduction
Yazid Sufaat, a former captain in the Malaysian Army, was arrested under Kuala Lumpur’s Internal Security Act (ISA) in December 2001. He was directly tied to two of the hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon; is known to have provided Zacarias Moussaoui with both money and false employment papers; is thought to have assisted in planning attacks against an array of Western targets in Singapore; and is still believed to have been integral to al-Qaeda’s early attempts to manufacture biological weapons. In December 2008, it was announced that Sufaat had been released from prison and is thought to still be in Malaysia.
Background
Yazid Sufaat was born on January 20, 1964, in Johor, Malaysia. He was the son of a rubber tapper and studied at the country’s prestigious Royal Military College. He won a scholarship to attend California State University, Sacramento, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Clinical Laboratory Technology in 1987, while his wife Sejahratul Dursina earned a degree in civil engineering there the following year (Sacramento Bee, April 20, 2002). Upon graduating, Sufaat returned to Malaysia and served in an army medical brigade until 1992. During the mid-1990s he established two businesses: Green Laboratory Medicine, a clinical pathology company; and Infocus Technology, a computer software and hardware importer. [1]
In the beginning of January 2000, Sufaat is known to have hosted an early al-Qaeda meeting in a condominium he owned in neighboring Selangor State on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. This crucial meeting, or “summit” as it was once referred, is thought to have been the principal preparatory session for the suicide bombing of the USS Cole on October 12, 2000, which killed 17 American sailors, and the 9/11 “planes operation”, which killed 2,977 individuals, both civilian and military as well as 19 al-Qaeda operatives. In attendance at Sufaat’s condominium were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Tawfiq bin ‘Attash (a.k.a. Khallad)—all senior operational field officers of al-Qaeda—and two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Immediately following the meeting, al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi left for Bangkok, Thailand where they spent several days unaccounted for by the CIA or NSA, before traveling on to Los Angeles International Airport, where, due to a major intelligence firewall inhibiting interoperability between the CIA and FBI, they managed to gain unhindered access into the United States. [2] For his part, Sufaat closely interacted with Zacarias Moussaoui, providing him with $35,000 in cash as well as the necessary documentation to apply for an American employment visa (Islamonline, February 01, 2002). [3] Although the exact purpose of this material support remains unclear—the trial of Moussaoui never established his true role in al-Qaeda—there is still a belief that it was somehow connected to finalizing preparations for what would become the 9/11 attacks.
Later in 2000, Sufaat is believed to have assisted an Indonesian named Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, a senior Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) explosives expert and militant trainer based at the time in General Santos City on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Al-Ghozi acquired four tons of ammonium nitrate for a series of planned attacks using truck bombs against a range of commercial, political and military targets in Singapore (Asia Times, February 6, 2002). Al-Ghozi was arrested in Manila on January 15, 2002, after information from arrests made in Singapore and Malaysia led to his apprehension by Philippine police while al-Ghozi was just moments away from traveling to Bangkok, and his terror plots for mainland Southeast Asia were thwarted due to diligent police work.
The following year Sufaat traveled to Afghanistan, where he is believed to have set up a laboratory on the outskirts of Kandahar Airport dedicated to the development of anthrax as part of al-Qaeda’s nascent biological weapons program. After apparently failing to procure a strain of the bacterium appropriate for offensive purposes, Sufaat left southern Afghanistan and returned to Malaysia (via Pakistan and Thailand) in December 2001. Upon entering the country through the Bukit Hitam immigration checkpoint, he was arrested under the provisions of the government’s Internal Security Act (ISA), which can detain suspects who pose a threat to the state without trial or charges being leveled. He was held for being an alleged member of the banned Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia (KMM-Malaysian Mujahideen Movement) and was subsequently transferred to the Kamunting Detention Camp in the northern state of Perak (Asia Times, November 23, 2002). [4] The Kamunting facility has been compared by internal critics to the infamous American detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for its deficit of transparency and human rights. According to Krishna Dallumah of Malaysia’s Bar Council, the United States had been a vocal critic of the ISA until it found the act useful following 9/11 when men like Sufaat were detained under its ambiguous auspices (Reuters, September 10, 2006). Sufaat’s wife, Sejahratul Dursina (a.k.a. Chomel Mohamad), was also detained on April 17, 2002, under the ISA for her partnership with her husband in both Green Laboratory Medicine and InFocus Technology and co-ownership of the Selangor condominium. [5] [6]
Contributing Factors to the Arrest of Sufaat
The arrest of Sufaat appears to have come about as a result of effective intelligence cooperation that occurred in two stages: first between Malaysia and the United States and, second, between Malaysia and Singapore.
The United States
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the United States first became aware of possible Malaysian al-Qaeda linkages in late 1999. Apparently, a communication intercept picked up by the National Security Agency (NSA), which was monitoring an alleged terrorist facility in the Middle East, indicated that several members of an “operational cadre” tied to the August 7, 1998, embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were planning on traveling to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. The information was analyzed by the CIA which, given the East African connection, assessed that something “nefarious [was] afoot” and duly alerted Malaysia’s Special Branch intelligence service. The names of the suspected jihadis were lodged with immigration authorities who positively confirmed their entry into the country (from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen) in January 2000. A covert surveillance operation was immediately mounted by Special Branch that tracked the movements of the cell to the condominium owned by Sufaat, whereby Malaysian agents covertly videotaped and photographed the meeting’s participants. [7]
For reasons that have yet to be publicly revealed, neither the Malaysian intelligence service nor the CIA actively engaged in any further monitoring activities until January 2001, when the investigation into the suicide bombing of the USS Cole revealed a tangential connection to those in attendance at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. Interest was further ignited in August of that year following the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained with a letter from Sufaat specifying him as a marketing representative for Green Laboratory Medicine, the clinical pathology company that Sufaat had set up in the mid-1990s. Although the information was passed directly to intelligence authorities in Kuala Lumpur, no action could be taken, as by that time the former Army Captain had left for Pakistan (and Afghanistan), ostensibly to undertake a course in religious studies at the University of Karachi. He was, however, listed by the Special Branch as a person of ongoing terrorist concern. [8]
Singapore
More concrete evidence of Sufaat’s role in regional extremism emerged in late 2001 when Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) uncovered a multi-pronged plan to bomb multiple high-profile targets in the city-state, including the U.S. and Israeli embassies, the Australian and British high commissions, an American naval ship docked at Changi port, and complexes housing some 250 Western business interests. ISD investigations into the plot named Sufaat as one of those who had helped procure the four tons of ammonium nitrate that was to be used for the attacks, working in conjunction with an al-Qaeda operative initially known only as “Mike” but later identified as Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. According to the intelligence collected, Sufaat had purchased the explosives through Green Laboratory Medicine the previous year and then arranged to have them stored in Muar, a small town on Malaysia’s Southwest coast. The intelligence was utilized by the Malaysian authorities and appears to have been the central factor in accounting for Sufaat’s immediate arrest after he tried to re-enter the country from Pakistan in December 2001. [9]
On-going interrogations have since revealed that al-Qaeda was engaged in an embryonic biological terrorism program while territorially based in Afghanistan before 9/11. Malaysian authorities assert that during questioning, Sufaat admitted to his involvement in a concerted effort to “weaponize” anthrax, but failed in achieving an effective result due to an inability to procure bacterium strains appropriate for large-scale offensive purposes. Former CIA director George Tenet detailed Sufaat as the “self-described CEO of al-Qaida’s anthrax program.” [10] Sufaat’s revelations fueled early speculation that al-Qaeda may have had some participatory role in the still unsolved anthrax attacks that took place along the east coast of the United States in the chaotic weeks following 9/11, though it is now commonly believed that a rogue American scientist, the late Bruce Edward Ivins, who worked for 28 years at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Ft. Detrick, Maryland and who committed suicide in 2008, was likely the culprit (Baltimore Sun, August 2, 2008).
Sufaat’s Current Activities
Sufaat’s period of custody at the Kamunting Detention Camp ended, after seven years, on November 24, 2008 (AFP, December 10, 2008). His release came after persistent and continuous demands to abolish the ISA as well as a campaign to free Sufaat and two other Islamist suspects—Abdul Murad Bin Sudin and Sulaiman Suramin—who had been held for six and seven years, respectively. Interior Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar justified the decision on the grounds that Sufaat no longer represented a threat to public safety and had been sufficiently rehabilitated to return to Malaysian society. “I think after holding him for so long, he can be brought back into society, but at the same time we will follow closely everyone that may have ideology [of] militancy or extremism,” Albar told reporters (AFP, December 10, 2008). To allay American fears, Interior Minister Albar also assured the then Bush administration that Sufaat’s movements would be tightly restricted (in addition to his subjection to a United Nations travel ban) and activities closely monitored (Reuters, December 10, 2008). Little has been heard from Sufaat over the past two years. According to local intelligence sources he lives in northern Malaysia where he quietly runs a small restaurant. Whether or not he remains active in biological research and continues to harbor radical Islamist sentiments is not known (though given the attention he receives from the security forces, it would be extremely unlikely that he openly propagates either). [11]
Notes
1. Information on Yazid Sufaat’s background had been available, “Sufaat, Yazid,” National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism’s (MIPT) Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) which was decommissioned on March 31, 2008, due to lack of sufficient funding.
2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), p.181. Although Mihdhar and Hamzi had been under surveillance in Malaysia before embarking to Los Angeles, the CIA failed to immediately register either individual with the State Department’s TIPOFF Watchlist and did not inform the FBI that the two men were suspected of being part of an operational cadre associated with suspected terrorist activity in the Middle East.; John Farmer, The Ground Truth (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), p.102 By the time they were later placed on the TIPOFF list by the FBI in August of 2001, the FBI failed to notify the FAA to place the two al-Qaeda operatives on its no-fly list.
3. See also Mark Manyin et al., Terrorism in Southeast Asia (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, RL31672, August 13, 2004), p. 11.
4. It should be noted that outside of Malaysian sources listing him as a Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia operative, Sufaat is generally described as being a member of Jemaah Islamiyah.
5. Although Sufaat was due to be released from Kamunting Detention Centre in January 2006, his detention was extended for another two years, to 2008.
6. See the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights document online entitled, “Civil and Political Rights, Including the Questions of: States of Emergency,” January 30, 2003, on the detention of Sejahratul Dursina under the ISA: https://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/TestFrame/4f0cc46311151a3ac1256d030038aa2a?Opendocument.
7. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), op. cit.
8. Author interview with source from the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research [Singapore], June 2006.
9. Ibid.
10. George Tenet and Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: The CIA During
America’s Time of Crisis (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 278-279.
11. Author email Correspondence with Singaporean Officials, August 2010.
