The beat-up video camera was delivered to Afghanistan in a box, and picked up by two clean-shaven Arabs posing as journalists. They met with Osama bin Laden before leaving on their mission — to kill the mujahedeen hero Ahmad Shah Massood. Five years after the Taliban opponent was slain by a bomb hidden in the camera, a former Taliban official on Saturday described how Al Qaeda staged the killing — two days before the Sept. 11 attack on America — hoping to strike a fatal blow to the pro-US Northern Alliance.Waheed Mozhdah, director of the then-Taliban Foreign Ministry’s Middle East and Africa department, also showed The Associated Press a copy of what he said was a signed letter dated Sept 13, 2001, from bin Laden to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, urging him to launch an offensive against the alliance. In the letter, written in Arabic, bin Laden said that if America failed to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks, it would decline as a superpower. But if the US started fighting, he added, its economy would suffer a major blow and it would face the same destiny as the Soviet Union — whose ill-fated 1980s occupation of Afghanistan heralded its disintegration.
Few details have emerged previously about how Al Qaeda plotted to murder Massood, the “Lion of Panjshir” who fought Soviet troops and led resistance to the Taliban regime. At the time, his Northern Alliance was under siege, barely clinging to a mountainous northern corner of the country. But the US military campaign after Sept. 11 to punish the Taliban for giving refuge to bin Laden propelled Massood’s supporters to power and the bearded commander has achieved iconic status. Giant portraits of him adorn government offices and public spaces in Kabul, and the Sept. 9 anniversary of his death is marked in grand style. The attackers apparently were North African Arabs traveling on forged Belgian passports who managed to pass through the front line between the warring Taliban and Northern Alliance carrying their bomb. One of the Arabs died in the bombing. The other, who survived the blast, was shot dead by enraged bodyguards.