L'Houssaine Kherchtou
| L'Houssaine Kherchtou | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 15, 1964 Morocco |
| Other names | Abu Zaid al Maghrebi, Abu Talal |
| Occupation | Cook, militant, state witness |
| Children | Three daughters |
L'Houssaine Kherchtou (born May 15, 1964) was an early initiate in al-Qaeda, joining the militant group in 1991. In 2000, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder, but as he was the chief witness against four of his former colleagues, all of whom were subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment, his charges were withdrawn and he entered the witness protection program.
Testifying in New York in the summer of 2001, he noted that al-Qaeda had trained suicide pilots to fly planes into buildings. Together with Jamal al-Fadl, his testimony forms the bulk of the information known about the early years of the Islamist group.
Following three years of catering school, Kherchtou spent three months in northwestern France in 1989, before making his way to Corsica and eventually Italy as an illegal immigrant. Later, he found the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, where he was encouraged by Anwar Shaaban to travel to Afghanistan. During his time in Italy, he managed to add Italian to his repertoire of languages, which included French, English, Arabic and Berber.
In 1991 he obtained a visa to visit Pakistan, ostensibly to attend a Tablighi Jamaat conference with his veterinarian friend Abu Ahmed el Masri, through the embassy in Rome. He disembarked in Karachi and flew to Islamabad, and onward to Peshawar; there he stayed in Bait al-Ansar before being spirited across the Afghan border through Mirahshah and enrolled in the al-Farouq camp. He later identified two trainers of the camp, Shuayb and Mushin Musa Matwalli Atwah.
Upon returning to Peshawar from al-Farouq, Kherchtou was approached and agreed to swear a bayat to Osama bin Laden's fledgling new group, al-Qaeda. He fought in the Afghan Civil War for two months, before being moved to train new Mujahideen at the Abu Bakr Siddique camp, which he has contradictingly placed in Hayatabad, Pakistan and Khost, Afghanistan.
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