Pakistan grabs terror suspects

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan has arrested two “high-level” al Qaeda terrorists, one with a multimillion dollar U.S. bounty on his head, widening a sweep against the group’s vast web of operatives that has netted at least six suspects, officials said yesterday.

Among those detained in the past two days were a policeman accused of passing information to al Qaeda militants, a Syrian arrested at a bus stop and a man carrying suspicious documents who was seized trying to fly out of the country.

Officials said the suspects are thought to be linked to a militant already in custody, who provided crucial intelligence leading to the arrest of a top fugitive last week and to Washington’s warning on Sunday of terror threats to U.S. financial institutions.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday the government concluded “it was essential” to publicize detailed surveillance documents and raise the terror alert, even though the intelligence information dated from as far back as 2000.

Speaking at a press conference in New York, Mr. Ridge said because of the heightened security steps, “We have made it much more difficult for the terrorists to achieve their broad objectives.”

Even though much of the material was dated, some of the al Qaeda surveillance data on potential targets had been updated as late as January, U.S. officials said.

Pakistan’s interior minister said yesterday that the latest arrests of high-ranking targets in eastern Punjab province marked another major break, coming just days after intelligence agents caught Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the Tanzanian sought by U.S. officials in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

“In addition to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, whose bounty was $25 million, we have captured another most-wanted suspect with a bounty on him running into the millions of dollars,” Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told reporters in Islamabad.

He said both men were of African origin, but refused to identify them or their nationalities.

Four Egyptians and a Libyan on the FBI’s list of 22 most-wanted terrorists are thought to be in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Each has a $5 million bounty on his head in connection with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. There are two Kenyans on the list, although they were not thought to be hiding in the region.

Osama bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is from Egypt. He and the al Qaeda chief are thought to be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghan border, far from Punjab province.

The arrests have come with stunning swiftness since the capture in Karachi on July 13 of an al Qaeda computer expert identified as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was sending coded e-mails to other operatives.

An intelligence official said Khan led authorities to Ghailani, who was captured after a 12-hour gunbattle in the eastern city of Gujrat.

Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed said Ghailani’s home computers contained e-mails with instructions for attacks in the United States and Britain.

Intelligence gained from the arrests of Khan and others was a major factor in Mr. Ridge’s decision to issue a warning on Sunday about an al Qaeda plan to attack prominent financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J.

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