§ Llew SmithTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what evidence he has that the hijackers who crashed the commercial airliners in the United States on 11 September were trained in al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. [14256]
§ Mr. BradshawAl-Qaeda, harboured by the Taliban regime, have for some time run training facilities in Afghanistan. Prior to the current military action against al-Qaeda targets, there were at least 12 camps across Afghanistan, of which at least four were used for training terrorists. Following military action none of these camps are operational.
Most of the nineteen11 September hijackers were al-Qaeda associates. A senior UBL associate has claimed to have trained some of the hijackers in Afghanistan. We know that al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out a failed attack on a US Navy destroyer in January 2000 had trained in camps in Afghanistan.