Briton linked to al-Qa'ida 'behind Calcutta killings'

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The drive-by shooting that killed five policemen and left 20 people wounded outside the American Centre in Calcutta on Tuesday has been linked by a senior Indian government minister to a Briton thought to have supplied crucial finance to Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.

The transformation of Ahmad Omar Sheikh from an exemplary schoolboy in Snaresbrook, east London, into an Islamic warrior is the stuff of every parent's nightmare. Mr Sheikh was a school prefect, a devotee of chess, recognised by his teachers as possessed of a brilliant gift for maths, remembered as soft-spoken and unassertive. Today he is at large somewhere in Pakistan, moving in the shadows as President Pervez Musharraf strives to cleanse the poison of Islamic fanaticism from his country, where it has penetrated so deep. He is one of thousands of holy warriors still active in the country, dedicated with the passion of a convert to imposing Osama bin Laden's brand of Islam on the whole world.

Mr Sheikh passed unexceptionably through Forest School, Snaresbrook, seemingly as well adjusted to his new country ­ his father was a wealthy Pakistani clothing merchant ­ as his classmate Nasser Hussain, now captain of the England cricket team. He moved on to the London School of Economics, vindicating his teachers' confidence in his ability, where he studied maths.

But in the summer of 1993 he took what turned out to be a momentous decision: he travelled to Bosnia with a "convoy of mercy" to help bring relief to Muslim victims of the Bosnian war. He was so appalled by what he saw that he returned home a changed man. Friends in London were shocked by the transformation. He had grown out his beard, physically he seemed stronger. Mentally he had become a holy warrior. He had discovered what he wanted to do with his life.

In December of the same year he acted on it. He flew to Pakistan, enrolled there in a militant outfit called Harkat-ul-Ansar and was sent to Afghanistan, where with other new volunteers he was trained in the use of arms by an élite corps of the Pakistani army ­ at the time still bosom friends of the jihadis.

For the militants dedicated to wresting Kashmir from India as a prelude to the creation of an Islamic revolution all over the world, Mr Sheikh was a rare catch: urbane, well educated, speaking English like a true Brit, holder of a British passport (obtained, it appears, in 1994). And they gave him a suitably challenging brief: to lure foreign tourists on holiday in India to remote locations in the Himalayan foothills, where they would be held hostage to pressure India into releasing other militants rotting in Indian jails.

Mr Sheikh fulfilled this ticklish mission to perfection: he befriended four foreigners, three British and one American, and induced them to accompany him to a remote village to meet his imaginary relatives. Suddenly they found themselves surrounded by armed men. Had the police not tracked the gang down and arrested them, it is probable, given India's reluctance in the past to play ball with kidnappers, that all the hostages would have been killed.

Five years later, in December 1999, Mr Sheikh himself was sprung from jail after Islamic militants hijacked an Air India flight from Kathmandu to Delhi. After the hijackers stabbed one passenger and forced the others to watch him bleed to death ­ a tactic employed by the terrorists on the 11 September flight that crashed in Pennsylvania ­ the Indian government caved in to their demands and flew Mr Sheikh and the others to Kandahar in Afghanistan. It was in Kandahar that Mr Sheikh was taken under the wing of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban.

Later he was spirited back into Pakistan where he has continued to play a key role in the al-Qa'ida network. Given the intense secrecy surrounding al-Qa'ida and all its doings, his exact role and importance are hard to gauge.

But Lal Krishna Advani, India's Home Minister, linked Mr Sheikh's group yesterday to the Calcutta drive-by shooting on Tuesday. He said that a caller from Dubai had telephoned police in Calcutta to claim responsibility for the attack. Information so far "indicates that a group which kidnapped a Calcutta businessman some time back and was able to extract ransom from him" was behind the shooting, the minister said.

The ransom he was referring to was paid last August to the man who called the police in Calcutta on Tuesday, and according to Indian investigators a large portion of that money, $100,000 (£70,000), went on to Mr Sheikh.

Mr Sheikh is said to have wired the money to the ringleader of the World Trade Centre terrorists, Mohamed Atta, in advance of the 11 September attacks, from his base in the Pakistani cantonment city of Rawalpindi. The circumstantial evidence suggests that he is now a linchpin of the organisation. The $100,000 covers about one-fifth of the total cost of the attacks on America: Mr Sheikh provided the vital conduit.

Thereby he perhaps gave the important financial leg-up that enabled Atta and his accomplices and their appalling scheme to fly; and then, a little later, to crash.