Pakistan arrests five al Qaeda suspects

11.20am

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has arrested more foreign and local al Qaeda suspects in the last two days as its month-long crackdown on Osama bin Laden's shadowy network gathers pace, officials say.

Intelligence and police officials announced on Thursday that at least five fresh al Qaeda-linked detentions in the last 24 hours.

The authorities are chasing various leads after questioning at least three top al Qaeda operatives caught in the last month -- Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Qari Saifullah Akhtar and computer engineer Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan.

They hope the trail will eventually lead to al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden, who Pakistani intelligence officials said on Wednesday had exhorted his followers to launch strikes on the United States, Britain and Pakistan.

Government officials said the suspects caught in the last two days were captured in various parts of the country.

"These people keep many aliases and it is too early to say whether there is an important target among them," one official said on condition of anonymity.

"They often appear as ordinary people, but during interrogation and investigations, they turn out to be real valuable people, big gems," he said.

Reuters reported on Wednesday the arrest of two Turkish al Qaeda operatives, believed to be behind car bomb attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul in November last year that killed 25. They also fought with rebels in Russia's breakaway region of Chechnya.

On Thursday, Pakistani officials reported new breakthroughs in the hunt for al Qaeda and its local Islamic militant allies.

Rao Mohammad Khalid, from a new group tied to al Qaeda called Jundullah, was arrested in the southern port city of Karachi on Thursday on suspicion of involvement in a June attack on Karachi's army chief. The commander survived but 10 people died.

An Uzbek, suspected of being trained by Ghailani to carry out a suicide attack, was arrested in Nowshera, 120 km (75 miles) west of Islamabad, on Wednesday. The man, identified as Mansoor, was caught by electronic surveillance and is being interrogated.

Ghailani, wanted in the United States for the 1998 embassy attacks in east Africa, was arrested with 13 other foreigners in a raid in the eastern Pakistani city of Gujarat on July 25. He gave information leading to Mansoor's capture, officials said.

Also on Wednesday, a man from the United Arab Emirates called Mohammad Khalid Rashid Ahmed was detained in Pakistan's tribal region of Mohmand trying to cross into Afghanistan. The al Qaeda suspect was accompanied by three Pakistani militants.

WAR ON TERROR

Hundreds of al Qaeda and other militant suspects have been handed to US custody by Pakistan since September 11, 2001, when President Pervez Musharraf decided to support the war on terror.

But many local and foreign militants remain in Pakistan, having developed links to al Qaeda and its leaders in the 1980s and 1990s when they fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and then trained together in bin Laden's camps.

Pakistan has detained around 30 militant suspects in the last month, including key foreign and local al Qaeda operatives, in a swoop that led to a security alert in the United States and the arrest of 13 al Qaeda suspects in Britain.

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has said Pakistan was hunting four or five al Qaeda "planners", without whom the network would be less able to launch attacks at home or abroad.

They are mid-ranking operatives, as opposed to leaders such as bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri.

Pakistani intelligence officials told Reuters on Wednesday that bin Laden, believed by US officials to be hiding along the 2,450-km Afghan-Pakistan border, had called for more attacks on targets in the United States, Britain and Pakistan.

It was not clear whether the arrests were leading Pakistani intelligence and a handful of US agents working with them any closer to the big prizes of bin Laden and al-Zawahri.

Experts question whether the two are able to give operational orders to al Qaeda when they are unlikely to risk using satellite communications and are hiding from tens of thousands of US and Pakistani troops on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

But bin Laden does appear to be exhorting militants to launch strikes abroad.

When asked by private Geo TV whether progress had been made towards finding a "high-value target", information minister Ahmed replied: "You can say so."

- REUTERS