HSA Group

In September 1997 Yemen the HSA Group hosted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s mostly Pakistani terror cell in their hilltop headquarters compound in Taiz city, 17-miles south of a town called Al Qaidah. HSA helped KSM plan 9/11 - I know that as a fact because I was there. I was a British service technician sent to spend a week in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s (KSM’s) front company, just three months after I’d given my first very specific 9/11 warning in Canada. I unwittingly shared the same 9/11 warning with members of KSM’s terrorist cell in Yemen, admittedly with a lot more detail, leading to the HSA Group HQ’s managing director Saeed Alrobaidi (called the Chief by everyone there) giving me a security contact in Taiz and arranging three meetings for me:

My security contact, ‘Shawki Alariki - 9674 216301’, was Sharqawi Abdu Ali – an Al Qaeda fixer from Taiz who spent twenty-two years in US custody, released from Guantanamo prison in 2024.
I was vetted over dinner in my hotel by a gentleman called Yousef, a 100% facial recognition match for Guantanamo detainee Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni member of the 9/11 Hamburg Cell and the original ‘20th Hijacker’. I think Yousef and al-Shibh are blood relatives, brothers or cousins.
The Chief (Saeed Alrobaidi) introduced me to the Engineer on my last morning in Yemen: it was Guantanamo detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We had our photo taken together but didn’t speak or interact further.
After meeting the Engineer, the Chief’s general manager Mohamed A. Salem* took me to an unscheduled meeting one mile from Al Qaidah town. Determined to catch my flight home, I cut that meeting short but think if I’d stayed they would have tried to recruit me to KSM’s terrorist network.
The factory mechanic in Yemen was introduced to me as Dino, who I am now certain was Al Qaeda’s mechanic in Yemen, Ahmad al-Darbi, who was released from Guantanamo in 2018.

* The HSA Group HQ's general manager Mohamed A. Salem was the US embassy Yemen and the US State Department Washington’s contact for the supply of industrial quantities of TNT explosives component chemicals in August 1996. I suspect the two Pakistani chemical engineering graduates who I trained to operate the machine I was installing used those chemicals to manufacture the TNT bombs used against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. KSM was in Kenya shortly before the attacks, and one of the bombers was caught and gave-up a contact phone number in Yemen. That number became known as ‘Al Qaeda’s switchboard’ and could very likely be linked to my Taiz security contact’s phone number - 9674 216301.

My security contact in Taiz

My dinner companion in Taiz

Me, KSM & Ahmed al-Darbi

My journey to the Base

Taiz city & Al Qaidah town

HSA Group headquarters

HSA's TNT explosives sourced via the US Embassy & State Dept

My full photo contact sheet from 1997 Yemen

Supporting Evidence

The only other accusatory report that I’m aware of and that names the HSA Group was published by Fox News in 2004. It details how in 1984 an HSA director became a founding signatory of a Swiss shell company that the United Nations and the U.S. government says has served as a hub of Al Qaeda finance: A terrorist chamber of commerce. The HSA director, Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed, denied responsibility, saying he’d given his power of attorney to Ahmed Idris Nasreddin in 1982 but then fell out with him and apparently ‘forgot’ to withdraw the power of attorney. Nasreddin was added to the U.N. watchlist of entities and individuals belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda in 2002 but was bizarrely removed from that list in 2007 without any explaination.

The Fox News report describes HSA’s subsidiary offices that “overlap in locations that are hubs of normal commerce, but also served as hotspots of Al Qaeda meetings and finance”. Their investigation focused on just one of HSA's many subsiduaries, called Pacific Interlink - a shipping company based in Malaysia. Fox News reported how Pacific Interlink price-skimmed on an UN-Oil-for-Food contract by adding about 15% above market price to the supply of palm oil to Iraq, meaning about $3-million was diverted from humanitarian relief on that $20-million deal alone (the HSA Group’s contracts with Saddam Hussain ran into hundreds-of-millions of dollars). HSA has massive palm oil interests in Indonesia through a shadowy network of front companies that remain controversial to this day. What Fox News missed is a remarkable coincidence in timing between HSA’s expansion into south-east Asia and the rise of extremist terrorist groups there. Pacific Interlink was established in 1988 Kula Lumpa, coinciding with the future Bali bomber and Jamaah Islamiyah terrorist group leader Hambali returning to Asia after eighteen months training in Afghanistan (9/11 Commission report page 150/151). Hambali (an Indonesian who was recruited in Malaysia) trained in camps run by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Afghan boss Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Another student of Sayyaf’s training camps was the Filipino founder of the Abu Sayyaf Group, who returned to the Philippines from Afghanistan in 1989 (West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center page 17). Was HSA’s Pacific Interlink shipping company used to support or facilitate this terrorist network’s expansion into south-east Asia? Given KSM’s activities in Asia (the Bojinka Plot to bomb a dozen civilian airliners over the Pacific Ocean for example) and the fact he was in HSA’s HQ in 1997 Yemen, I’d say almost certainly.

A more recent HSA link to terrorism funding arises from the Tadhamon International Islamic Bank (TIIB) that provided financial services in areas of Yemen controlled by Daesh, as detailed by a Forbes report from 2016, titled What ISIS Is Banking On. Although the Forbes article doesn’t mention HSA, when searching for the HSA Group’s HQ address (PO Box 5302, Taiz) I found a TIIB share certificate (pictured right) that lists a HSA director who uses that HQ address to register his holding in the TIIB.

Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed, named in the 2004 Fox News report

A 2005 New York Sun report highlighting the HSA Group's long standing links to terrorism financing

TIIB share certificate

The HSA Group & the Deep State

It was the U.S. Defense Contract Audit Agency that exposed HSA’s Pacific Interlink’s price skimming on UN-Oil-for-Food contracts and so it seems remarkable that today HSA is partnered with UN relief efforts in Yemen and was given ‘trusted trader’ status by USAID. HSA’s links to terrorism financing is evidenced by both the UN and the US government’s terrorism financing designation the Swiss shell company that HSA director Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed was a founder member of, and yet today HSA is a World Economic Forum partner. This lack of accountability and then promotion of the HSA Group by some of the world’s most powerful entities is what I describe as HSA’s Deep State links.

Along with the US embassy Yemen and State Department Washington sourcing TNT component chemicals for the HSA Group in 1996, one of the Deep State's most brazen acts was the HSA Group shopping in 1997 Chicago... work-in-progress