Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

EAST TURKESTAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENT • 159On 20 October 2000 Ali A. Mohamed testified that bin Laden hadordered him to scout out U.S., British, French, and Israeli targetsin Nairobi, including the U.S. embassy. The trial of four bombingsuspects began in March 2001, and on 29 May 2001 a U.S. federalcourt convicted Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, of Tanzania, and MohamedRashed Daoud al Owhali, of Saudi Arabia, for conspiracyand murder for their roles in assembling and delivering the truckbombs used in the two attacks. The court also convicted MohammedSaddiq Odeh, a Palestinian, and Wadih el-Hage, a naturalizedU.S. citizen from Lebanon, for conspiring to kill Americans aroundthe world. On 11 June 2001 al Owhali was sentenced to life imprisonment.On 18 October 2001 Odeh, a Jordanian al Qa’eda member,Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, and el-Hage were also sentenced to lifeimprisonment.On 22 June 2006 the United States identified three at-large suspectsbelieved to be hiding in Somalia, namely, Fazul Abdullah Mohamed,Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, and Abu Taha al-Sudan, and requested theIslamic Courts Union, an insurgent group in control of much of Somaliaat that time, to arrest them. These suspects were also believedto have been involved in the 2002 attacks on an Israeli-owned hotelin Kenya. In October 2006 the FBI confirmed that Muhsin MusaMatwalli Atwah, also known as Abdel Rahman al Mahajir, who hadbeen indicated as one of the coconspirators responsible for the embassybombings, had been killed in April 2006 during a Pakistani airstrike against rebels in north Waziristan.EAST TURKESTAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENT (ETIM). An Islamicfundamentalist Uighur group that seeks independence of China’swestern Xinjian-Uighur Autonomous Region, also known as EastTurkestan, and is believed to be linked to al Qa’eda. Chinese authoritiesblame the group for several car bomb attacks in Xinjiang inthe 1990s and also for the assassination in 2002 of a Chinese diplomatin Kyrgyzstan. Some members of the ETIM have admitted totraining with al Qa’eda. The ETIM was placed on the U.S. TerroristExclusion List in August 2002, allowing the freezing of its funds inthe United States, while the U.S. State Department declared in 2005that the group had links to al Qa’eda and the “international jihadistmovement.” Some analysts believe that the ETIM and the IslamicMovement of Turkistan both seek to create a Pan-Turkish Islamic