Al-Qa'ida trained over 100,000 terrorists at Afghanistan bases, says US intelligence

Al-Qa'ida could have trained more 100,000 terrorists in its camps in Afghanistan, according to senior American intelligence officials.

According to the report of a high-level inquiry into the September 2001 attacks, which is due to be released this week, between 70,000 and 120,000 terrorists were trained in Afghanistan before the coalition invasion in 2002. The figure, based on testimony by senior US intelligence officials to a joint inquiry by the US Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees, is at least three times higher than previous estimates.

The hearings were told that the al-Qa'ida recruits came from more than 70 countries and were trained in skills from bomb-making and weapons use to foreign languages. Many are believed to have escaped capture and are lying low around the world.

One of the authors of the report, Senator Bob Graham, said the estimate suggests that al-Qa'ida remains the main threat to the West. The Bush administration "lost focus" when it turned its attention to war with Iraq, in his view.

"We allowed al-Qa'ida to regroup and regenerate," said Senator Graham. "They've conducted a series of very sophisticated operations, thus far none in the United States, but seven Americans were killed in Saudi Arabia. We have to assume that as those people were placed around the world, some were placed inside the US. Some of them are in the US today."

The British security services estimate that some 600 people trained in the Afghan camps now live in the UK, according to one Whitehall source. But MI5 believes that many have returned to normal life, sickened by their experiences of the Afghan civil war.

Senator Graham, a Democratic presidential candidate and the senior Democrat on the senate intelligence committee, also criticised the Bush administration for delaying release of the report. Nearly 900 pages long, it is due to be published on Thursday after months of delays caused by secrecy arguments.

After nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions last year, the inquiry's report was completed in December. A limited summary was released then, but the full report has been under review by the FBI and CIA, which were concerned that the release of some of their evidence was a risk to national security. Senator Graham said the administration had approved inclusion in the final report of the estimate of the total number of terrorists trained by al-Qa'ida, mostly in Afghanistan between 1995 and 2001.

One official told The New York Times last week that counter-terrorism officers frequently complained about the absence of human intelligence from the Afghanistan camps, saying that analysts had to rely on reports from foreign intelligence services, satellite imagery and intercepted communications, none of which detected any advance sign of the impending attacks.

"We had amazing satellite pictures of them having graduation ceremonies at the camps, but we never had a clue what they planned to do when they left Afghanistan," the official said.

Nearly an entire section has been removed from the final report at the insistence of the intelligence agencies. It describes the actions of foreign governments, including Britain and Saudi Arabia, before the attacks. Unlike most other official publications on intelligence, the report will have sections blacked out, making it possible to see how much of it has been deleted.

Apart from the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the question of whether he is still alive, other mysteries remain in the wake of 9/11, says the inquiry team. One is how 19 young men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, could conspire to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon without the knowledge of the Saudi government.