Last week they got a big break. One of the six men in U.S. custody in the embassy case, an Egyptian-born former U.S. Army sergeant named Ali Mohamed, pleaded guilty to helping plan the bombings–and attributed them to bin Laden. “Among the targets I did surveillance for was the American Embassy in Nairobi,” Mohamed declared on Friday. “Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where the truck could go as a suicide bomber.” Mohamed, who is expected to receive a reduced sentence for his cooperation, named others who were involved in the conspiracy. As important, his testimony allowed prosecutors an unprecedented look inside bin Laden’s shadowy world, giving them a boost in tracking the elusive terrorist leader–and, perhaps, helping them determine if he was involved in the Cole attack.
Investigators still have no clear idea who carried out the Cole strike–and haven’t ruled out hostile states like Iraq. But bin Laden’s network is considered a probable suspect in part because the sophisticated C-4 explosive believed used in the blast is expensive and hard to come by. Yemeni police officials hinted that the bombing was carried out by the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad, whose leader, Ayman El-Zawahri, has been described as bin Laden’s military commander. NEWSWEEK has learned that the same team of U.S. investigators and prosecutors that worked on the embassy bombings has been assigned to the Cole disaster. And the FBI lab in Washington is sifting through wreckage sent back from Yemen.
Late last week Navy officials were under pressure to explain how the Cole was left so vulnerable in the first place–and whether they gave a misleading account of what happened. On Friday the Navy issued a revised version of the attack that sharply contradicted its original story–that a small bomb-laden boat had disguised itself as part of the port’s docking crew. The Navy now says the ship had already been moored for nearly two hours and had begun refueling by the time the small vessel slowly pulled alongside the Cole at 11:18, an hour earlier than the Navy originally claimed. The Navy explained that the destroyer’s commanders had jumbled the times in the chaos following the blast, and said the armed guards keeping watch on the Cole didn’t think the small boat was a threat.
Investigators are now chasing down dozens of leads, including information from a boy who told officials he saw two men launch a small boat a few miles away from the port and evidence found in two safe houses believed to have been used by the bombers. Last week Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh confidently predicted the case would be solved within a week. But as prosecutors still trying to solve the embassy bombings know, it will probably take a lot longer than that.
