KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – A former pilot for Afghanistan’s state-owned Ariana Afghan Airlines has said he unknowingly transported Osama bin Laden and dozens of his associates from Sudan to Afghanistan in May 1996, five years before the September 11 attacks.
Mohammad Omar Afzal told the BBC in an interview published on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, that he did not know the identities of his passengers at the time. The flight took place during the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Afzal said Sudanese clients chartered a round-trip flight between Kabul and Khartoum for $50,000. On May 13, 1996, he flew from Bagram to Jalalabad to collect passengers and cargo, then continued via Dubai to Khartoum.
After landing in the Sudanese capital, the civilian aircraft was directed to a military stand. Afghanistan’s then-ambassador in Sudan told Afzal that visas had been issued for four people and that the return flight could proceed once cargo was ready. The process took about four days.
On the day of departure, the crew found 95 people on board. When they questioned the discrepancy with the four visas, Sudanese officials refused to explain and insisted the charter flight proceed regardless of passenger numbers.
After a stop in Dubai, the aircraft continued toward Afghanistan. Afzal coordinated for a landing in Kabul but was ordered not to land at Bagram on instructions from “high-ranking officials.” He instead landed in Jalalabad, where a large reception party of Afghans, Arabs and officials from factions including Jamiat-e Islami and Hezb-e Islami awaited the passengers.
Upon returning to Kabul, Afzal was informally questioned by Ariana management. He later learned that then-Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud had ordered the ban on a Bagram landing. A fellow pilot identified bin Laden among the passengers, and civil aviation minister Mawlawi Mansour was aware of their identities, Afzal said.
The episode brought Afzal only an administrative reprimand — a temporary flight ban and one month’s salary deduction. He now lives in Belgium and flies for a Georgian airline. He said he feels no guilt because he did not know the passengers’ identities and was not responsible for checking them. He described the transfer as part of a “complex intelligence operation” of which many government officials were unaware.
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national born in 1957, founded al-Qaeda in 1988 as a network emerging from Arab volunteers who had fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan. After years based in Sudan, he was expelled in 1996 under international pressure and returned to Afghanistan. He later received protection from the Taliban, who seized Kabul in September 1996.
From bases in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda planned and carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed when hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden publicly claimed responsibility. He was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2011.
