|
|
|
Overpowered: How Rashid Rauf Got Away
Winter
Patriot
Tuesday December 18, 2007
Rashid Rauf just slipped out of his handcuffs and overpowered the policemen
who were escorting him back to jail after his court appearance on Saturday,
or so we were told in a stream of breathless and speculative reports,
as
documented here over the weekend.
Rashid Rauf has been called "a key person" in the so-called "Liquid
Bombers" plot, and alternately named as either "the mastermind", or
"the messenger" connecting the plotters to al Qaeda leadership supposedly
overseeing the alleged plot to down a dozen trans-Atlantic airliners more
or less simultaneously. [Rashid Rauf is seen in this photo, taken after
his court appearance December 5.]
Rashid Rauf's arrest in Pakistan in August of 2006 was the trigger for
the arrest of 25 people in Britain on the 9th and 10th of the month. Ten
of those arrested (including
Rashid Rauf's brother, Tayib Rauf) were released without charge, but
fifteen others still face charges, including "conspiracy to murder" for
eleven of them. Their trial is slated to begin in the spring; Great Britain
has been trying to extradite Rauf from Pakistan in connection with that
trial.
The Pakistani charges against Rashid Rauf himself have been dropped
-- twice.
But they have been quietly reinstated both times.
The alleged plot -- if successful -- would have killed more
people than 9/11, "a senior intelligence" source told The Observer,
and Michael Chertoff, DHS-meister at the time, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer
that the plot could have killed "hundreds
of thousands of people".
The alleged plotters were supposedly planning to mix bombs from liquid
explosives which they would have smuggled aboard the aircraft disguised
as sports drinks. We're told they were planning to step into the washrooms
with their bottles of Lucozade and emerge with bombs capable of knocking
jumbo jets out of the sky.
From a chemical and logistical point of view, the plot (alleged or otherwise)
was impossible, regardless of whether the plotters were intending to make
TATP (as suggested by
the Guardian),
or HMTD
(as suggested by the New
York Times), or MEKP
(as hinted on a few message boards). All of the reactions in question
take much longer to complete than any terrorist would possibly be allowed
to spend in the washroom aboard a flight, intercontinental or not, as
we have documented here
(and here,
and especially here).
So -- chemically, at least -- this alleged plot could never be done on
one plane, let alone a dozen, let alone a
dozen planes at the same time -- but that doesn't matter, because
this case is not about knocking down airplanes; it's
about knocking down democracies!
Thus we had flashing terror alerts and the virtual lockdown of Heathrow,
with the cancellation of thousands of flights, and the airlines losing
millions. And to this day we have much more restrictive airport security
-- none of which makes us any safer than we were last August, when we
were in absolutely no danger.
But it's not about explosives; it's about propaganda. And from a propaganda
point of view, the alleged plot was -- and remains -- almost perfect,
especially since the timeline is so shaggy, and the use of classified
national security information for political purposes is so obvious, as
documented P. O'Neill at the excellent Best
of Both Worlds (starting here,
then here,
later here,
and finally here).
It would have been completely
perfect had it ended in a blaze of glory with Rashid Rauf's miraculous
disappearance, in which he somehow opened
his own handcuffs and overpowered
his escorts to vanish inexplicably into the mist of Islamabad.
But instead we now have a
detailed account of Rashid Rauf's escape, as told by Shakeel Anjum
in Pakistan's The News, who has
sources inside the team investigating the incident. Shakeel Anjum's story
begins last week:
A warning letter was sent to the capital police by the superintendent
[of the] district jail to tighten security of the high profile British
national of Pakistani origin, as he was a hardened criminal, Adiala jail
sources told The News.
The letter, dispatched in the second week of December, was addressed to
SP [superintendent of police] (Headquarters) as well as a DSP [deputy
superintendent] of the police headquarters responsible for deploying duties...
Apparently the letter wasn't enough.
Sources said ...
the authorities, taking it as a routine letter, marked it to the higher
authorities without taking any measures to beef up Rauf’s security.
And so ... Rashid Rauf's police escort consisted of two policemen, Constables
Wazirzada and Muhammad Tufail, who told the investigating team that they
were traveling with Rashid Rauf, who was handcuffed, in a private taxi.
Great Britain has been asking for Rashid Rauf to be extradited, even though
Pakistan has no extradition treaty with the UK.
Pakistan
has requested a certain builder in exchange for Rashid Rauf, but the
UK has apparently declined. Two Balochi nationalists were arrested
in London last week in what appears to be an attempt to set up a counter-offer.
Rashid Rauf and his police escort had been in Islamabad for an extradition
hearing on Saturday, and at about 3:00 in the afternoon, as they were going
back to the jail, they passed a mosque (on Adiala Road, near Gulshan-e-Abad).
Rashid Rauf asked if he could go in and pray.
Constables Wazirzada and Tufail said he could.
He asked them to wait in the car.
And they did.
About twenty minutes later, Muhammad Tufail went into the mosque to find
that Rashid Rauf had slipped out the back door -- handcuffs and all!
The news took its sweet time finding its way up the chain of command, according
to Shakeel Anjum, who quotes an
officer inside the investigation as saying:
“The authorities
took the transportation of the suspect so non-seriously that only two
cops were deputed to move him and that too in a private cab instead of
a police mobile van.”
The officer also said:
“Apparently, Inspector (Hawalaat)
is responsible for his escape because he is supposed to take the ... inmates
from jail and send them back escorted by heavily guarded police vehicles.”
But this time everything was done differently:
“Reserve
Inspector (RI) headquarters sent the ‘special team’ comprising two constables
to fetch the high profile suspect from jail by a private car instead of
police van and to take him back to jail in the same way.”
“The police high-ups were informed about his escape about two-and-a-half
hours after the incident,” the officer said.
To cap off our story, The News
reports that no "missing persons" bulletin was ever issued over the police
wireless network.
So there you have it. It may be perfect after all.
Perfectly miraculous? Not exactly.
Perfectly ridiculous? Now you're cookin'!
|
