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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.
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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.
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