2000 Al-Qaida Summit
The 2000 al-Qaida Summit was a high-level al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A man named Yazid Sufaat lent his condominium, the Kuala Lumpur Hotel, to Islamic veterans of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Several people working on the attack came, including Hambali, Ramzi Binalshibh, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Tawfiq bin Attash. The United States had intercepted a telephone call to Yemen which al-Mihdhar made arrangements for the trip. Osama bin Laden had called that telephone number dozens of times. The CIA asked Malaysian authorities to monitor the meeting, which they did. Much of the meeting was videotaped, although no sound recordings were made.
The men were also photographed when they came out of the meeting. U.S. investigators did not identify these men until much later. The meeting lasted from January 5 to January 8, 2000. The summit's purpose was allegedly to plan future terrorist attacks, which apparently included the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 plot.
U.S. investigators figured out that Binalshibh attended by looking at credit card records. Sufaat was later arrested. He denied that he knew the men that Hambali asked him to keep in his condominium.
