WASHINGTON — Until recently, Ammar al-Baluchi was considered a peripheral player in Al Qaeda, a functionary who made travel arrangements and wired money for terrorists.
But new government disclosures place Baluchi in a larger role in the Sept. 11 preparations and rank him No. 4 among the conspirators captured by U.S. forces after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Indeed, investigators say he was instrumental in acquiring a Boeing 747 flight simulator and a Boeing 767 flight-deck video for the hijackers to practice on before heading to the United States.
"He was turning up everywhere we looked -- like a chameleon," recalled one federal agent who spoke on condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.
A man of many names, Baluchi seemed to have his hand in everything.
He allegedly served as travel agent, personal banker and mother hen for at least nine of the 19 hijackers, sending them off from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for their fateful rendezvous in the United States.
Baluchi also reportedly sent onetime "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla on his way to Chicago with thousands of dollars and travel documents, though Padilla was captured as he stepped off the plane.
He tried to sneak a terrorist into New York to blow up gas stations on the East Coast, according to evidence in another terrorism trial. And when he was captured in April 2003, he was found hiding in his native Pakistan with the man behind the suicide attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole.
A few of Baluchi's activities were sketchily cited in the Sept. 11 commission report and elsewhere. He has been variously identified as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and, more simply, as "Losh" in the Sept. 11 conspiracy. In the plot to blow up gas stations on the East Coast, he presented himself variously as "Habib" to one collaborator and "Mustafa" to another.
But it was not until the end of the sentencing trial of avowed Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui that a clearer portrait of Baluchi emerged.
The last piece of evidence in the trial was a four-page document in which the government, for the first time, officially identified the six top Al Qaeda figures captured in the Sept. 11 plot.
The captives were listed in order of importance, and Baluchi came in at No. 4.
Believed to be in his late 20s, Baluchi was born into the business. The man at the top of the list, Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is his uncle. His first cousin is Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
