Bin Laden's Boys?

By Massimo Calabresi/Washington

It's hard to solve a crime if you can't keep track of the suspects. Just ask federal investigators trying to unravel the Algerian Connection: the conspiracy behind Ahmed Ressam's attempt to bring bombmaking materials into the U.S. last December. Until they can interrogate some missing players, the feds won't know if the plot is the work of alleged terror nemesis Osama bin Laden.

First, Canadian authorities could not find Ressam's Algerian compatriot, Abdelmajid Dahoumane, indicted with Ressam for transporting explosives and timing devices from Canada into the U.S. on Dec. 14. While an uncooperative Ressam pleaded not guilty last Thursday in Seattle, Dahoumane remains at large. Then Irish police lost track of Hamid Aich, also Algerian. He lived in Vancouver at the same time as Dahoumane, and the U.S. would like to question him. But he had ducked out to Ireland, where he was arrested briefly during the holidays, then released. Now he has disappeared. Last week came the clincher. A man who might link the Algerians directly to bin Laden slipped past Canadian surveillance to exit the country. Mohambedou Ould Slahi ended up in Mauritania.

Investigators have a few circumstantial clues hinting at bin Laden's involvement. Ressam and several of his Montreal-based associates, once linked to the brutal Algerian terror organization Armed Islamic Group, had grown away from that band's local fight. FBI agents have unverified reports that they trained at camps in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is a major funder of Islamic militancy. While police found no signatures that prove the provenance of the timing devices in Ressam's car, the units were "strikingly similar" to ones produced at bin Laden's camps.

But evidence of a direct link to the militant Saudi millionaire is far from clear along the trail that began with Ressam. The feds figure he was just a "mope"--G-man jargon for an expendable figure--an amateur with the least skills who gets the job with the most exposure. That explains why he was nervous enough to catch Customs' attention as he came off the ferry at Port Angeles, Wash. It also explains why he was careless enough to leave a paper trail. Ressam's pockets produced a scrap of paper scribbled with the name "Ghani." That took the FBI to their next suspect, Abdel Ghani Meskini, an Algerian expatriate living in Brooklyn, N.Y. A snitch told the FBI that Meskini had said Ressam's instructions were to "take the explosive-laden vehicle to a parking lot and walk away from it," according to a federal complaint. And Ressam carried a phony credit card that led to Montreal shopkeeper Mokhtar Haouari, who, said a federal indictment, sent Meskini to Seattle in mid-December to help Ressam. After the bust at Port Angeles, Haouari allegedly called Meskini with instructions to destroy his pager and change his telephone numbers. Too late. The FBI concluded that Haouari was a logistics specialist and facilitator for the Algerian cell--but not the cell leader.

One good bet for finding the brains behind the bomb plot, investigators believe, may be a third man Canadian authorities were watching: Slahi. Born in Mauritania, he moved to Montreal last fall from Germany. U.S. officials found he had been in contact with Haouari. When his name was run through the databases, it turned out he was the brother-in-law of one of bin Laden's closest associates, a man cryptically known as "the Mauritanian." Washington experts say that man is a member of bin Laden's Shura, or advisory council, and there are indications that he may know something about the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Slahi had also been in frequent contact with his brother-in-law before Ressam's ill-fated smuggling attempt.

That's all investigators found out before things went wrong again. Slahi, aware he was under surveillance, fled to a Montreal mosque, where the Canadians lost him. U.S. intelligence officers tracked him to Senegal, but before a team could be dispatched to interview him, he was let go. He is being detained in Mauritania, but U.S. officials are worried that they will be denied access.

For the moment, the Algerian Connection's tie to bin Laden amounts to the fact that "the Mauritanian" and Slahi and Haouari talked to one another a lot. "It doesn't mean they were operationally linked," says an official familiar with the case. "You gotta prove that." To do so, investigators will need better luck holding on to their suspects.

--With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington