Wallid bin Attash, a captured al Qaeda operative, has confessed that he was the mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a transcript of a military hearing released Monday.
Attash said he bought the explosives and recruited members of the team that rammed an explosives-laden boat into the side of the American destroyer while it was refuelling in the port of Aden. 17 US sailors were killed. "I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation," Attash told a military panel convened in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on March 12 to determine his status as an enemy combatant.
Attash acknowledged that he also was involved in the 1998 suicide bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Nairobi blast killed 213 people and another 12 died in the near simultaneous explosion in Dar Es Salaam. Speaking through a military officer assigned to represent him, Attash said the government's unclassified summary of the evidence against him had facts about the operations "mixed up."
"Facts of the operations are correct and his involvement are correct, but the details are not correct," the officer representing him said, adding that the detainee did not wish to correct the details.
Asked where he was at the time of the attack on the Cole October 12, 2000, Attash said he was with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
At the time of the East Africa embassy bombings, Attash was "in Karachi meeting the operators, the guy that basically did the operation a few hours before the operation took place," he said, according to the transcript.