Mohammed, Fazul Abdullah (1972 or 1974–)

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is believed to be one of the leading operatives of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in East Africa. An explosives and computer expert, he was added to the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Mohammed was born in the Cormoros Islands, a tiny former French colony off the coast of East Africa. As a teenager, he received a scholarship for a fundamentalist Islamic education in Pakistan and left the Cormoros. According to the 1998 U.S. indictment in the embassy bombings, he attended al Qaeda's paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan in 1991 and 1992. The international terror network al Qaeda serves as an umbrella group for other militant organizations, and establishes cells in areas where attacks are carried out. Group members manage the cells and recruit individuals to perform administrative and other tasks. According to the indictment, Mohammed worked for Wadih el Hage, the leader of the Nairobi cell in Kenya. He and other al Qaeda members also allegedly provided military training to Somali tribes opposed to the United Nations intervention in Somalia's civil war in 1993.

The indictment also claims that in late 1996 or early 1997, Mohammed began sending coded messages to co-conspirators in the embassy bombings plot. He and Hage carried funds from bin Laden to Kenya. He later rented the Nairobi villa at 43 New Runda Estates, where the bomb was assembled and where final preparations for bombing the embassy were made. On August 7, 1998, Mohammed left the villa in a pick-up truck, driving just ahead of the bomber to lead the way to the U.S. embassy. In a synchronized attack 400 miles away, a bomb-laden car also approached the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The bombs exploded just minutes apart, killing a total of 224 people.

Shortly following the embassy bombings, the U.S. government declared that bin Laden and al Qaeda operatives were responsible. As retaliation, President Bill Clinton ordered air attacks on al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in the center of Khartoum, Sudan. Three suspects indicted in the embassy bombings case pled guilty and cooperated with the U.S. government as witnesses. This resulted in the conviction of Wadih el Hage and three other men linked to bin Laden for conspiracy in the bombing at their October 2001 trial in U.S. District Court in New York City. All of the defendants who pled not guilty were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Mohammed, however, fled to the Cormoros Islands the week following the attacks. He then flew on to Dubai, and by 2001 he was back in Kenya. In July 2002, Mohammed was arrested by Kenyan police (who did not know his true identity) in connection with an armed robbery, but he escaped.

On November 28, 2002, two surface-to-air missiles were fired at an Israeli airliner filled with tourists as it took off from Mombassa, Kenya. The missiles narrowly missed, but that same day a suicide bomber attacked a resort near Mombassa that is popular with Israeli tourists: 15 people died, most of them Kenyans. Mohammed is believed to have been one of the masterminds of the Mombassa attacks. He is thought to be hiding in Somalia, a country with a nonexistent central government that shares a long, porous border with Kenya.

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