July 2001: Head 7/7 London Bomber Trains in Pakistan, Fights with Taliban

In 2008, a British Muslim named Waheed Ali will testify that he and Mohammad Sidique Khan, the head suicide bomber in the 7/7 London bombings (see July 7, 2005), attended militant training camps and fought with the Taliban. Ali is charged with assisting the 7/7 bombings, and while he denies those charges, he describes his trip with Khan. He says that the two of them flew to Pakistan in July 2001. They were picked up at the Islamabad airport by members of the Pakistani militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and were driven to a training camp at the village of Mansehra, in the mountains of Pakistan near the border of the disputed province of Kashmir. They received special treatment because they were from England, which was unusual. They learned to shoot Kalashnikovs. Then the two of them went to a Taliban camp near Bagram, Afghanistan, about one mile from the front line in the civil war with the Northern Alliance. There, they became very ill with diarrhea and did not do much. However, Khan recovered enough to go the front line a few times. [Guardian, 5/21/2008]