Washington:
Some senior Al Qaeda leaders were in Pakistan's Karachi city on September 11, 2001 and most returned to Afghanistan within a day, Washington Post reported on Monday citing documents accessed by WikiLeaks.
The media report said that core Al Qaeda leaders were in Karachi. While one of them was recovering at a hospital from a tonsillectomy and another was buying lab equipment for a biological weapons program, key Al Qaeda members were watching the scenes from New York and Washington on television.
But, within a day, most were on their way back to Afghanistan.
Classified military documents have been accessed by WikiLeaks that show the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders on September 11, 2001, and later.
The documents speak of a major gathering of some of Al Qaeda's senior operatives in early December 2001 in Afghanistan's mountainous Zormat region.
The leaders who gathered there planned new attacks.
The documents show that just four days after 9/11, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden went to a guesthouse in Afghanistan's Kandahar province.
He told the guerrillas there "to defend Afghanistan against the infidel invaders" and to "fight in the name of Allah".
For the next three months, bin Laden and his confidant Ayman al Zawahiri travelled by car to several areas in Afghanistan. It was during that time that he delegated control of Al Qaeda to the group's Shura Council.
Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri also used a secret guesthouse in or relatively close to the Afghan capital Kabul. Bin Laden met a string of visitors and gave orders.
Bin Laden alongwith Zawahiri and a few close associates escaped to his Tora Bora cave complex in November.
He and his deputy left Tora Bora in mid-December 2001.
The media report said that during that time, bin Laden was apparently so strapped for cash that he borrowed $7,000 from one of his protectors. He, however, returned the money within a year.
Washington Post said there were few geographic references in the WikiLeaks documents for bin Laden after his flight into Pakistan.