L'Houssaine Kherchtou

Life Following three years of catering school, Kherchtou spent three months in northwestern France in 1989, before making his way to Corsica and eventually Italy as an illegal immigrant. Later, he found the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, where he was encouraged by Anwar Shaaban to travel to Afghanistan. During his time in Italy, he managed to add Italian to his repertoire of languages, which included French, English, Arabic and Berber.

Joining al-Qaeda

Upon returning to Peshawar from al-Farouq, Kherchtou was approached and agreed to swear a bayat to Osama bin Laden's fledgling new group, al-Qaeda.

In 1994, he was asked to attend a flight school in Nairobi in preparation to become Osama bin Laden's personal pilot. After receiving his pilot license, he returned to the Sudan in December 1995, but was appalled to find that his wife, heavily pregnant and in need of $500 for a cesarean section, was begging on the streets for money to allow her entrance to Khartoum's general hospital. Kherchtou went to Sayyid al-Masri and asked him to cover his wife's medical bills, and was upset upon being informed there was no money to spare and al-Masri suggested he take her to a Muslim charitable hospital for free treatment. He angrily demanded to know "if it was your wife or your daughter, you would take her there", and later recounted that he was angry enough he would have shot al-Masri if he had a gun at the time.

Following the 1994 execution of the sons of Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mohammed Sharaf for betraying Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the militants were ordered to leave the Sudan. Kherchtou disobeyed orders to relocate to Afghanistan, claiming he was concerned about the education his children would receive in such a country, although he is also believed to have still felt snubbed after being refused financial compensation for his wife's operation, He moved back to Kenya and developed a relationship with Ali Mohamed and by happenstance, he claims he ran into "Haroun" and "Ahmed", both of whom he had known during his time in al-Qaeda. The three of them began to meet through the Mercy International Relief Agency offices.

He was arrested as he tried to leave Nairobi four days after the 1998 United States embassy bombings, and handed over to the British. They dubbed him "Joe the Moroccan", and set him free with a promise to travel to Khartoum and be an informant; although he went to Sudan, he never called them back or gave them any further information.

In his testimony, he made the only known reference to an "Abu Ayub al-Iraqi" whom he claimed was the head of al-Qaeda's military branch until 1991, when the commonly presumed first chief Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri took over. He also suggested that al-Qaeda relied on diamond smuggling to raise funds for their operations. He was accused of "contradicting" himself after he said he knew that Wadih el-Hage was a member of al-Qaeda, but under cross-examination admitting he had told the British intelligence agents that he didn't know el-Hage's allegiance two years earlier, and telling the FBI the same thing only six months prior to the trial.

Some have questioned how honest he was about his own role in the bombings as he freely implicated everybody but himself.