AAMIR QURESHI/AFP NABBED: A plain clothes police officer arrests a suspected militant in Karachi

Reeling in al-Qaeda
	The network's elusive terrorists have to be captured one by one. The inside story of how a big fish got snared
	By Michael Elliott

Posted Sunday, Sept. 15, 2002; 2:31 p.m. EST

The apartment building in a run-down commercial neighborhood of Karachi called Phase II had been under surveillance as a possible al-Qaeda safe house for weeks, following leads from the CIA. But when a small troop of Pakistani intelligence operatives and commandos started their raid in the early hours of last Wednesday, they didn't expect fierce resistance. Nor, according to Pakistani intelligence sources, did they expect to net one of the biggest fish in the war against terrorism.

It would be a morning of surprises. As the Pakistanis crept up the stairwell to the fifth-floor apartment, a grenade exploded in their path. The agents retreated outside the building. When reinforcements arrived, a gunman appeared at a fifth-floor window and began shooting at the officers, who returned fire with submachine guns. A second wave of police arrived and tried to smoke their targets out; they lobbed perhaps 20 tear-gas canisters into the apartment and shot hundreds of rounds at the windows. Finally, an assault team of five officers, some wearing gas masks, stormed in. They encountered little resistance; the men inside were exhausted and wounded. Two who still had ammunition were mowed down. Five others, unarmed and defenseless, were holed up inside another room. Also in the apartment were a woman and her daughter, about 4 years old. As they were led away, a police officer says, the men chanted "Allahu Akbar."

God may be great, but he's not always on the side of those who claim to act in his name. Among the men detained in Karachi was one of the world's most wanted individuals: Ramzi Binalshibh, a 30-year-old Yemeni accused of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. Although Binalshibh was not among the hijackers, it wasn't for lack of trying. A roommate in Hamburg, Germany, of Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 plot, Binalshibh had tried and failed four times to get a visa to the U.S. Investigators have long believed he was meant to be "the 20th hijacker," a suspicion confirmed in an interview Binalshibh gave this summer to the Arab TV station al-Jazeera, which broadcast an audiotape of the interview last week. In the interview, Binalshibh gave details of the Sept. 11 attacks, including code words for the targets and confirmation that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was headed for the Capitol — code words, "The Faculty of Law." And he expressed regret that he was unable to take part in the attacks.

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