Ambush starts thread of al-Qaida arrests

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The torrent of intelligence that led to dozens of arrests in Pakistan and Britain and a terror warning in the United States began with a hunt for those behind an audacious ambush in June on a Pakistani commander as his motorcade tried to cross Karachi's Clifton Bridge.

The trail has led from the teeming streets of that southern port city, to the dusty tribal village of Shakai along the Pakistan-Afghan border, to seemingly placid suburban London, to the world's financial headquarters in New York and to Washington, D.C.

The arrests of several senior al-Qaida figures in Pakistan and Britain in the weeks that followed -- including a key operative in London and a man on the FBI's most-wanted list for the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa -- are a striking example of intrepid police and intelligence work, international cooperation and simple good luck.

The breaks have dealt a significant blow to Osama bin Laden's network, eliminated a tribal transit point for his men and drawn the strongest link yet between al-Qaida's international plans and attacks on senior politicians here, including President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the prime minister-designate, more than half a dozen Pakistani police and intelligence officials said.

What they haven't done, officials warn, is eliminate the al-Qaida threat, or prevent leaders like bin Laden from organizing attacks.

"This is a network that we are trying to break. It is in the process of being dismantled," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat said Friday. "But the network is still not finished."

The gunmen escaped after the June 10 attack on Ahsan Saleem Hayat, Karachi's top general, but police traced them through a stolen van found abandoned and bloodstained later that day.

The van's owner gave police a description of the men who had stolen it, and that led them to a militant hideout in Karachi where on June 12 they arrested nine people, including alleged ringleader Atta-ur Rahman and another man, a young Pakistani named Shahzad Bajwa.

On June 12, police and intelligence agents in Karachi also arrested Masrab Arochi, a nephew of al-Qaida's former No. 3 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and a suspected terror operative himself, Hayyat told the AP.

Hayyat said Arochi, Rahman and Bajwa had all been to Shakai, which he described as "a major transit point" for al-Qaida figures.

Pakistani intelligence officials say the CIA cooperated in the Arochi arrest, as well as those that followed.

Arochi's family has long ties to terrorism. He is a cousin of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and is serving a life sentence in the United States.

The government has failed to produce Arochi in court. Hayyat was circumspect about his connection to other al-Qaida figures, but three intelligence officials said on condition of anonymity that he led police to a network of other operatives, including Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer expert nabbed July 13.

The arrest of Khan was a breakthrough -- revealing a terrorist web that stretched far beyond Pakistan's borders, officials say.

His computer had coded e-mails to many other al-Qaida operatives, as well as photographs of Heathrow airport and other potential terrorist targets in Britain and the United States, according to a Lahore-based intelligence official involved in the investigation.

Khan helped lead authorities to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian with a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head for his role in the deadly 1998 embassy bombings.

Ghailani was arrested July 25 after a fierce gunbattle in the eastern city of Gujrat. Two South Africans, identified as Feroz Ibrahim and Zubair Ismail, were arrested with him, and authorities said they were believed to be plotting attacks in their homeland.

Information taken from Khan and Ghailani's computers was shared with British authorities, who on Tuesday conducted a sweep in and around London that netted 13 suspects, including a man known as Abu Eisa al-Hindi or Abu Musa al-Hindi. One man was later released.

Al-Hindi is suspected of having written terrorist surveillance reports detailing security, construction and other features of five U.S. financial buildings that were the center of a terror warning issued by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge last Sunday.