Top al Qaeda Figure is Held in Pakistan

[Snowden]

washingtonpost.com

Top Al Qaeda Figure Is Held in Pakistan


By Kamran Khan and John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 5, 2005; A01


KARACHI, Pakistan, May 4 -- An al Qaeda operative described by U.S. intelligence sources as the third-ranking figure in the terrorist organization has been captured in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, officials disclosed Wednesday. He is accused of having plotted two assassination attempts against Pakistan's president.

Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan, was seized with three other men after a shootout Saturday in the town of Mardan, about 40 miles northeast of the city of Peshawar, Pakistani and U.S. officials said.

The capture of al-Libbi, the most senior al Qaeda official after the group's leader, Osama bin Laden, and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, marked a major strike against its new generation of leaders, according to U.S. officials in Washington and terrorism analysts.

Although al-Libbi was all but unknown at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the officials said, he took a principal role in al Qaeda operations in Pakistan after the March 2003 arrest of his mentor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"If he's a big fish, it's because it's a much smaller pond," Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, said from Washington. "He has advanced through the ranks because of attrition in al Qaeda. It shows how this movement has a knack for replacing serious operatives -- a deep bench."

Al-Libbi's association with bin Laden goes back to the al Qaeda chief's time in Sudan before he fled to Afghanistan in 1996, according to one senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

More recently, al-Libbi not only ran military training for the terrorist group but worked on sending members to other countries, the official said. Al-Libbi was mentioned in connection with threatened terrorist plots in the United States before the 2004 presidential election, he added. A former senior CIA official who was aware of al-Libbi during that period described his capture as "a very big deal."

A senior Pakistani intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the arrests were carried out after U.S. intelligence sources provided Pakistani authorities with communications intercepts and information gathered by American forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

"Like many other significant al Qaeda captures here, our men made the crucial strike, while the lead came from the Americans," the senior official said.

In Washington, President Bush hailed the capture as an important victory.

"Al-Libbi is a top general for bin Laden," Bush said at the start of a previously scheduled speech on Social Security. "He was a major facilitator and a chief planner for the al Qaeda network. His arrest removes a dangerous enemy who was a direct threat to America and to those who love freedom."

Al-Libbi, 42, has been identified by Pakistani officials as the principal financier and planner of the December 2003 assassination attempts against Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president. In an interview last summer, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said al-Libbi was directing terrorist operations in Pakistan and elsewhere from the remote tribal region of South Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan. Pakistani authorities had offered a reward of about $335,000 for his capture.

Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, said in an interview Wednesday that al-Libbi took over as al Qaeda's chief operations planner after Mohammed's arrest. Al-Libbi has told interrogators during the last few days that "his dream was to make another 9/11-type terrorist strike in London or New York," Sherpao said.

But al-Libbi was not on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists even though U.S. intelligence officials described him as high-ranking.

The arrest was the most important in Pakistan since that of another top al Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, last July 25, Sherpao said. Ghailani was wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Like hundreds of other al Qaeda suspects captured in Pakistan since the fall of Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban government in late 2001, Mohammed and Ghailani were quickly turned over to the United States. But Pakistani officials said Wednesday that they had no plans to hand over al-Libbi and that he would be put on trial in Pakistan for trying to assassinate the president.

"As KSM's successor, his first task was to kill President Musharraf," a Pakistani official said, using Mohammed's initials. "He organized a terrific network of Pakistani al Qaeda sympathizers and nearly got the president in December 2003."

Al-Libbi allegedly planned the attacks with help from Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a 32-year-old Pakistani from the radical group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. Farooqi recruited Pakistani air force technicians and low-ranking army and police personnel to carry out the attacks.

In the second one, on Dec. 25, 2003, two suicide bombers drove vehicles packed with explosives into Musharraf's motorcade in Rawalpindi, the Islamabad suburb where the president resides. Nineteen people were killed, but Musharraf was unscathed. Farooqi, who was also suspected of involvement in the 2002 kidnapping and murder of a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was killed in a shootout with Pakistani intelligence agents in September.

Last year, Pakistani newspapers published advertisements naming al-Libbi, Farooqi and three other men as the country's most-wanted terrorists. A photograph of al-Libbi, who sometimes went by the alias Dr. Taufeeq, showed a well-groomed man with a neatly trimmed beard in a Western-style sport coat and tie.

A photograph taken after his capture and released by Pakistani authorities Wednesday suggested that life as a fugitive had taken its toll. It showed a haggard-looking man with blotchy skin. A Pakistani intelligence official said there were indications that al-Libbi was suffering from kidney trouble.

Pakistani officials provided no details on the three men arrested with al-Libbi.

The arrests came just before the arrival in Islamabad on Monday of Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Mike Jackson, the British chief of general staff. Both were briefed on the arrest before their separate meetings with Musharraf on Monday and Tuesday.

Lancaster reported from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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[JohnRN]

Lashkar-e-Jhangavi is no "radical outfit" but a known terrorist group and has claimed responsibility for a number of attrocities in the Kashmir Valley.