has said something that should stop Pakistan's numberless and mindless "conspiracy" theorists from spreading the word that 9/11 was done by the Jews. Speaking to a Pakistani TV channel, Sheikh Saeed stated that the 9/11 attack on the US was carried out by 19 men of Al Qaeda and that Pakistan did a dastardly thing by handing over the "courageous" Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and many others, to America. He also said that suicide-bombing was allowed under Islam and declared those clerics who outlawed it as "lackeys of the government".Sheikh Saeed, who heads Al Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan, is Egyptian in origin and spent three years in jail along with the second senior-most man of Al Qaeda, Ayman Al Zawahiri. The Pakistani journalist taken from Karachi to visit his stronghold was spotted by a Palestinian "studying" in Karachi but in fact devoted to jihad. The journalist was told that he was taken to the province of Khost in Afghanistan where he met the Al Qaeda operational chief. Curiously enough, the Pakistani reporter did not ask him about the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto, a "job" admitted by an Al Qaeda spokesman immediately after the killing.
Sheikh Saeed was aggressive about the validity of suicide-bombing but balked at accepting the attempt at the life of the ex-interior minister, Mr Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, inside a mosque. He denied that Al Qaeda had tried to kill Mr Sherpao. Again, curiously enough, the reporter did not ask if it was involved in the second attempt that did not take place inside the mosque. Possibly because he doesn't want to incur Al Qaeda's wrath again, Mr Sherpao himself says the culprits behind those attacks were the intelligence agencies of India and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.