Shortly After October 12, 2000: Mastermind of USSColeBombing Protected by Yemeni Government

In 2008, the Washington Post will report that shortly after the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, US and Yemeni investigators are able to determine that the mastermind of the bombing was al-Qaeda leader Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (see November-December 2000). Yemeni authorities insisted that Nashiri had fled the country before the Cole bombing. But an anonymous senior Yemeni official will tell the Post that in fact al-Nashiri was still in the country and Yemeni investigators had located him in a town about 90 miles northwest of the Aden, where the bombing took place. Al-Nashiri spends several months in this town while receiving high-level protection from the government. “We knew where he was, but we could not arrest him,” this official will say. [Washington Post, 5/4/2008] It has separately been reported that several months before the bombing, al-Nashiri was given safe passage through Yemen without needing to be searched, at the orders Yemeni interior Minister Hussein Arab (see April 2000).