Washington Post
By Ernesto Londoño
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During al-Qaeda’s early years in the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden ran the terrorist group out of Sudan, a young Libyan man who was part of his country’s besieged diaspora of Islamists used his advanced computer skills to rise to the top of the organization long before it emerged as a global menace.
After the Libyan uprising started in early 2011, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai — who was detained by U.S. Special Operations forces over the weekend — was among the Islamists who flocked back home. He soon received an important assignment from al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, according to a U.S. intelligence official: establish a cell for the network in his strategic North African homeland, which was reeling from a brutal civil war.
Besides being trained in surveillance, the computer engineer had skills that were deemed invaluable for an organization with growing transnational aspirations, said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated the embassy bombings.
“He was definitely one of their smarter people,” Soufan said in an interview. “In the ’80s and ’90s, not a lot of people knew about computers.”
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