1994: Surveillance of Bin Laden’s Brother-in-Law Exposes Bojinka Plot

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, is monitored while living in the Philippines. The former head of Philippine military intelligence chief will later say that Khalifa was monitored starting in the late 1980s. [Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9/20/2001] The surveillance intensifies when investigator Rodolfo Mendoza begins an invetigation into foreign terrorist connections in the Philippines in 1994. He will later say that the report is based on “hundreds of wiretaps and countless man-hours of surveillance… In 1994 up to 1995, my unit [tracked] Khalifa [with] tight investigation and surveillance.” Mendoza believes Khalifa is running a front to fund the training of fighters for the Abu Sayyaf and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and submits a secret report about this on December 15, 1994 (see December 15, 1994). [CNN, 11/24/2004] Philippine and US officials will later assert that there is evidence of contact in the mid-1990s between Khalifa and WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef. [Atlantic Monthly, 5/1996] Phone taps from Khalifa’s offices will lead to Konsonjaya, a front company financing the Bojinka plot, which could kill thousands (see June 1994). By December, Tariq Javed Rana, another apparent Bojinka plotter, is also being monitored (see December 1994-April 1995), as are other Bojinka plotters such as Yousef (see Before January 6, 1995). The Bojinka plot will be foiled days before it is to be implemented, apparently after police deliberately set a fire in Ramzi Yousef’s apartment to provide an excuse to look around (see January 6, 1995).