Mohammed Odeh

Mohammed Saddiq Odeh (born 1 March 1965)^[1] is a Saudi-born al-Qaeda member, sentenced in October 2001 to life imprisonment for his parts in the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. Odeh was convicted along with three co-conspirators: Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed and Wadih el Hage. Another defendant, Ali Mohamed, pleaded guilty the previous year. Another, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, was awaiting trial, and three additional defendants were fighting extradition in England.^[3]

Mohammed Saddiq Odeh
Odeh being transported to United States from Kenya, 1998
Born	(1965-03-01) 1 March 1965 (age 60)[1] Tabouk, Saudi Arabia
Arrested	1998 Karachi, Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence and FBI
Citizenship	Jordanian and Kenyan
Detained at	United States Penitentiary, Coleman I, Florida[2]
Other name(s)	Khalid Salim
ISN	42375-054
Alleged to be a member of	al-Qaeda
Charge(s)	1998 US embassy attacks
Penalty	life imprisonment (2001)
Status	in prison
Spouse	Nassem Nassor born August 15, 1969 [1]
Children	Yasser Boy

He is currently imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary in Coleman, Florida.

Activities

In March 1993, Saif al-Adel ordered Odeh to Somalia to train tribes in fighting.^[4] He has been accused of training forces loyal to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in 1993, while other sources have suggested he was training Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya members.^[5][6] The following year he was sent to Mombasa, Kenya with money from Mohammed Atef to purchase himself a 7-tonne trawler and start a fishing business.^[7]

An engineer with both Kenyan and Jordanian citizenship, Odeh was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan after a flight from Nairobi to Karachi using a forged Yemeni passport, with a photograph that clearly did not match his face,^[5] supplied to him by Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. Odeh was interrogated by Pakistan’s ISI agents because he listed his flight destination as "Afghanistan", and he confessed to his role in the bombings, claiming that seven men had plotted them together.

A week later he was returned to Nairobi, where he was taken into custody by the FBI. The FBI interrogated him from 15–27 August 1998, and FBI's Special Agent Daniel Coleman confirmed that he had accepted responsibility for the bombing.^[8][9][10]