American alert leads back to a computer expert seized in Pakistan

By JUSTIN HUGGLER in Islamabad

Like so much in the "war on terror", the trail of the latest warnings of imminent al Qaeda attacks and orange alerts in the United States appears to lead back to Pakistan - and, more specifically, to two recent arrests of al Qaeda suspects here.

One, that of Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, who is a prime suspect in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, was trumpeted by the Pakistani authorities as a major triumph and reported around the world.

The other, of a mysterious "computer expert", was kept secret and went unreported at the time. It is still veiled in secrecy.

Pakistan is refusing to confirm the name of the arrested man, or even that he is believed to be an Al Qaeda member.

"He is a very wanted man, but I cannot say his name now," was all the Information Minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, would say.

The Pakistani authorities are playing up the arrest of Mr Ghailani as the main source of information on al Qaeda plans for new attacks in America and Britain.

But the US is putting more emphasis on the arrest of the computer engineer, at least according to US press reports. Little is known about this man. Almost the only source is a report in The New York Times, citing unnamed American officials.

It appears he was arrested two weeks before Mr Ghailani, on 13 July. The computer engineer, identified by the paper as Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, is said to have set up a code system for sending messages to al Qaeda operatives over the internet.

He is described as being heavily built, 6ft 2in tall, and speaks English with a British accent. The accent is reminiscent of Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Although he was living in Pakistan at the time, Mr Sheikh was brought up and educated in Britain. But it is believed the computer engineer is the unemployed son of someone who works with Pakistan International Airlines, and took his degree from a university in Karachi.

There has been widespread scepticism that Tom Ridge's warnings of imminent attacks in New York and Washington may have been politically motivated - with the presidential election in November and President Bush doing badly in the polls.

The timing of two arrests that apparently provided vital information could be just as convenient for Pakistan, which has come under pressure after receiving scores of mentions in the 9/11 commission's report.

Mr Ridge, the Secretary for Homeland Security, made a point of singling out Pakistan for praise as an ally at his press conference.

The computer engineer is said to be one of thousands of Pakistanis who received training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and to have been a major link in its communications.

Based in Lahore, far from the main military haunt for al Qaeda on the Afghan border, he received messages by word of mouth from couriers and sent them on over the internet. They were sent by one courier from al Qaeda leaders on the run in the border area to religious schools, or madrassas, in the same area, then by second courier to the computer engineer in Lahore.

He sent them over the Net in code, deleting them after they were sent and changing email addresses often.

This account contradicts many of the assumptions about al Qaeda.

Most experts believe that Osama bin Laden's core group has been decimated since 11 September, with around 80 per cent of its membership killed or captured. Recent attacks are believed to have been carried out by allied groups, whose members were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but who are no longer communicating directly with the core group.

If the story of the computer engineer is true, it suggests that an al Qaeda leadership remains operational inside Pakistan and is ordering attacks around the world.

The engineer was described by one US intelligence source as part of the "new al Qaeda". But he is said to have told interrogators that neither he nor any of al Qaeda's leadership knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Meanwhile, Pakistani officials are playing up Mr Ghailani's arrest, saying that the information that led to the new American warnings came from a computer of his that was seized during the operation. They said it also contains plans for attacks in the UK.

Pakistani officials said yesterday that they believed Mr Ghailani and his companions were in Gujrat planning to try to leave Pakistan on false passports. Apparently Gujrat is a major centre in Pakistan's highly developed human-smuggling network.

Mr Ghailani and his companions had only moved into a house in the city a month before, and Pakistani intelligence is said to believe they had fled there from a major army operation in South Waziristan.

- INDEPENDENT