Abu Atiya

Abu Atiya (Arabic: أبو عطية) (also rendered in Latin script as, inter alia Abu 'Atiya, Abou Attiya and Abu Attiyah) was the nom de guerre of a Jordanian alleged jihadist whose true name has been reported variously as Adnan Muhammad Sadiq, sometimes in whole, and sometimes followed by Abu Najila, and as Adnan Sadiq Muhammad Abu Injila.

Abu Atiya associated with Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. In 2003, as part of his case for the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell accused Abu Atiya of being a key organiser in an alleged plot to conduct lethal attacks in Europe using the nerve agent ricin.

He is not to be confused with the target of Operation Larchwood 4, who was captured by the British SAS in Iraq in 2006. The target was a different associate of Al-Zarqawi, but journalist Mark Urban decided to refer to the man as Abu Atiya in an account of the operation.

Early involvement in transnational jihadism

U.S. officials suspected that Abu Atiya was related to Al-Zarqawi, and that Abu Atiya's father had helped run Al-Zarqawi's training camp in Herat Province, Afghanistan. Abu Atiya is often said to have trained at the Herat camp, and sometimes to have been a senior subordinate or confidante of Al-Zarqawi's there. Their numbers swelled the next year following the fall of the separatist capital, Grozny, to Russian troops. A French intelligence report dated 6 November 2002, later filed in a court case, stated that he was in charge of preparations there for chemical attacks in Europe.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in December 2002 an alleged terrorist who had been captured by the U.S. in March 2002 said under interrogation that Abu Atiya had dispatched nine men of North African descent to Europe in 2001 to prepare attacks.

Powell showed a slide that depicted a purported Al-Qaeda network under the command of al-Zarqawi, including a bearded man named Abu 'Atiya located in Pankisi, Georgia. Also depicted on the slide were three other Jordanians who either grew up, like Zarqawi, in the city of Zarqa, or who were related to him: Abu Taisir, Abu Hafs al-Urduni, and Abu Ashraf. Two Algerian jihadists arrested in France in December 2002 were also named: Menad Benchellali and Merouane Benahmed. The slide also featured an unidentified detained "Al-Qaeda operative", perhaps meant to represent Abu Zubaydah. At the time, Al-Zarqawi was yet to formally join Al-Qaeda.

A group of some 50 militants remained in Pankisi as of June 2003. He was deported to Jordan late that September, and was remanded to the custody of Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID).

Abu Atiya's purported confession to GID officers was used to convict Arif, Benchellali and others in the 2006 Chechen Network case. Atiya later told Human Rights Watch in 2007, while still in custody, that he had been given unidentified pills and injections during his interrogations in Jordan, had been subject to sleep deprivation, and hadn't been allowed to read his official confession before he signed it.

His interrogation during this time was also the source of claims that French jihadists in Chechnya had acquired two surface-to-air missiles, and planned to use them in an attack within France. Abu Atiya was released from GID custody on 30 December 2007, having never been formally charged.

Names

The name Abu Atiya has the form of a kunya, an Arabic teknonym in which men are referred to as "father of" (Abu) their oldest child, or oldest male child, if they had one. Arab nicknames and noms de guerre often use the kunya form, as do a number of real family names.

When Abu Atiya identified himself to Human Rights Watch researchers in 2008, he reportedly gave his name as Adnan Muhammad Sadiq Abu Najila. Abu Najila in this case appears to be a family name, rather than a kunya indicating that his eldest child was a girl named Najila. German criminal investigators had previously identified him in 2005 as Adnan Sadiq Muhammad Abu Injila.