The Martyrs' Home Movies

By Romesh Ratnesar

The tape lasts just over two minutes, like a trailer for an upcoming horror flick. Three Arab men appear in separate shots: one has wide eyes and a gesticulating left hand; another appears to read from a text, never looking up at the camera; the third buries his head between his knees, then cozies up to a Kalashnikov and smiles. The silent footage, released by the Justice Department last Thursday, was spliced together from five tapes recovered by allied forces in the rubble of the home of Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda's operations mastermind who was killed by a U.S. air strike in November. They were no ordinary home movies. The five men who appear on them are members of al-Qaeda, and U.S. authorities say they were recording messages of martyrdom--a move commonly made by people about to stage a suicide terrorist attack.

The release of the tape, which came a week after the broadcast of a seized al-Qaeda video detailing a bombing plot in Singapore, was a chilling reminder of the terror network's destructive aims and the elusiveness of its operatives. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the U.S. has launched an international manhunt for the five and asked the public to help "identify, locate and incapacitate" them. A senior U.S. official told TIME that the tapes were first viewed by CIA specialists, who passed them along to the FBI. Officials at both agencies were so convinced the tapes showed evidence of a possibly imminent suicide attack that they rushed them into the public eye before completing their usual analysis and translation of the footage. "It seemed like a good idea to get their faces widely shown," says one official. "If we sat on the tapes and those guys did something bad, you could legitimately criticize us for failing to do everything possible."

At least one face is familiar to U.S. investigators: Ramzi Binalshibh, a 29-year-old Yemeni who appears wearing a red kaffiyeh, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French operative arrested in August and indicted Dec. 11 for planning terrorist attacks. U.S. officials believe that Binalshibh is a hard-core suicide martyr who wanted to be the 20th hijacker. A member of the Hamburg cell led by Mohammed Atta, he unsuccessfully tried to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. to take flying lessons on four occasions in 2000. He also wired thousands of dollars to the hijackers; last August he sent $14,000 to Moussaoui. On Sept. 5, he fled Germany and has been at large since. In January 2000, Binalshibh met in Malaysia with several al-Qaeda operatives--including two future hijackers and two men who would be implicated for planning the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. The CIA obtained a videotape of the meeting shortly after it took place. But Binalshibh was not identified until sometime after Sept. 11.

The four others on the tapes--Muhammad Sa'id Ali Hasan, Khalid Ibn Muhammad Al-Juhani, Abd Al-Rahim and one as yet unidentified--had not previously appeared on America's most wanted list. Administration officials don't believe the tapes contain coded messages to al-Qaeda sleepers. Analysts say the tapes were created strictly for internal consumption or for the men's families. The men spoke of accepting their fate as martyrs, joining the war against infidels and becoming one with Allah, but they did not discuss specific targets or timing.

That won't ease growing anxieties among U.S. authorities about the threat of another attack. Says an official: "The assumption is that they are trained terrorists willing to die for their cause." What no one knows is whether they're about to try.

--By Romesh Ratnesar. Reported by Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington