October 29, 2001: Australian Citizen Arrested in Pakistan with Two Members of Al-Qaeda’s Hamburg Cell

An Australian citizen named Mamdouh Habib is arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities. He is arrested while traveling on a bus from Quetta to Karachi, after possibly attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Also arrested on the bus are Ibrahim Diab, a Lebanese national, and Bechim Ademi, a naturalized German, two recently recruited members of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany that also included a few of the 9/11 hijackers (see September 10, 2001). Diab and Ademi are also coming from an al-Qaeda training camp, but they will later claim they had only just met Habib in Quetta before getting on the bus. Pakistani authorities appear to have been looking for Diab and Ademi, and only picked up Habib because he was with them. However, Diab and Ademi are soon returned to Germany and then released, while Habib is renditioned to Egypt and tortured there, and then sent to the US-run Guantanamo prison in Cuba (see October 29, 2001-April 2002). [Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 7/20/2004; Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed, 7/26/2004 ]