Adham Center News

Yosri Fouda Interview Causes Stir

The most detailed and indisputable confirmation by an Al-Qaeda leader of his organization's responsibility for 9/11 was broadcast last month (September 2002) in a special Al Jazeera documentary. The correspondent who secured the interview and who produced the documentary report was Adham Center alumni Yosri Fouda, senior investigative reporter and London bureau chief for Al Jazeera. The subject of the interview was Ramzi bin Al-Sheeba, head of Al-Qaeda's military committee and a former flatmate of Mohammed Ata (who led the 9/11 suicide hijackers.) "This was the most important investigation, possibly the biggest story, I have ever reported," Fouda told AdhamOnline.

Fouda's own account of how he secured this story will be published in an interview "Covering Al-Qaeda" in the forthcoming fall-winter issue of the electronic journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies <www.tbsjournal.com>, which is published by the Adham Center and will be online in early November 2002.

What made this scoop even more harrowing for Fouda than flying into Karachi (the killing field for the American investigative journalist Daniel Pearl), being driven into the countryside by his contacts, being blindfolded and then driven back, presumably to Karachi, for a two-day interview with both Ramzi bin Al-Sheeba and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al-Qaeda operations chief for the 9/11 attack, was that Bin Al-Sheeba was seized by the Pakistanis and turned over to American intelligence officers shortly after the documentary was aired by Al Jazeera. This capture was described by President George W. Bush as a major boost for the war against terrorism.

Fouda was initially denounced as "a pig and a traitor" on various radical Islamist websites and he told the Washington Post (which reported as did other media that the interview had taken place in Karachi last June), "I can't blame people for thinking what they do. I myself tried to think if there could be some link." (Fouda was alluding to rumors that U.S. intelligence agents were secretly planting tracking devices on Al Jazeera correspondents likely to be in contact with Al-Qaeda.) "But why would the intelligence apparatus wait for all this time to act?" he said.

These days Fouda is breathing a bit easier, despite a two-week assignment in Baghdad that was to begin only hours after his telephone interview with AdhamOnline. That is because on September 28th a pro-Al-Qaeda website Jehad.Net exonerated Fouda of any connection with Bin Al-Sheeba's capture. What convinced Fouda that Jehad.Net is an authoritative voice for Al-Qaeda and that his exoneration is authentic is that Jehad.Net alluded to the interview as having taken place in May, not in June. "I can tell you now," Fouda said, " that this was the actual time of the interview, which we intentionally obscured in our own Al Jazeera reports to protect our go-between in Karachi."

After Baghdad, Fouda is looking forward to a trip to Cairo, where he will be appointed Associate of the Adham Center at a luncheon in his honor. "That is a big honor for me" said Fouda, who has already received the Kamal Adham Award for Professional Achievement. Fouda believes he "owes a lot to the Adham Center. The education and training I received in the Center's program is the basis of whatever I have achieved and I am very proud to be one of Abdallah Schleifer's students," he said, alluding to the director of the Center.

So far only four alumni have received the Kamal Adham Award for Professional Achievement. The others are Fouda's colleague Lamis Hadidi, who is business correspondent for Al Jazeera as well as managing editor of Alam al Youm, Sami Zeidan, until recently an anchor and correspondent for CNN in Atlanta and a former Nile TV correspondent covering President Mubarak, and Nervine Alireza, who is now reporting from Beirut for the Dubai Business Channel.

THE EDITORS