AL-QAIDA chief Osama bin Laden is involved in an unfolding plot to launch attacks on European cities and may have also targeted the United States, a radio report said.

Flags flew at half-mast on government buildings and at the Kremlin as a day of national mourning for the victims of the Moscow tube blasts began.

SAUDI Arabia has arrested 113 suspected al-Qaida members accused of planning attacks on oil facilities in the kingdom, the Interior Ministry said yesterday.

Pakistan launched a much-awaited ground offensive in the al-Qaida and Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan early today in the toughest test yet in its struggle against militants aiming to topple the state.

Belgian authorities today charged six suspected al-Qaida-linked extremists with membership of a terrorist group.

Mauritanian prosecutors called the Christmas Eve murder of four French tourists a terrorist act and said security forces were hunting three suspects believed to be members of a regional al-Qaida-linked network.

US aircraft killed more than 20 al-Qaida fighters who opened fire on an American air patrol north-west of Baghdad, the military reported today.

An al-Qaida operative who allegedly brought hundreds of European Islamic militants to Indonesia for military training is in the country, an intelligence official said today, refusing to say if he was under arrest.

“GOD is good,” said the old tramp one icy night as he made his way unsteadily over a narrow bridge.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, whose actions to strengthen the oil kingdom’s ties with the US brought down the wrath of Islamic militants, was taken to a Riyadh hospital yesterday apparently suffering from pneumonia.

A trial of 24 suspected al-Qaida members, including three accused of helping plot the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US, went into its second day today with the lone native-born Spaniard among defendants again taking the stand.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was expected to arrive in Pakistan later today for talks with President Gen Pervez Musharraf and defence officials, a foreign ministry official said.

The CIA is interrogating senior al-Qaida operatives at a secret detention centre in Jordan, an Israeli newspaper reported today, citing international intelligence sources.

Osama bin Laden’s alleged bodyguard and chauffeur today becomes Guantanamo Bay’s first terror suspect brought before a US military commission that allows for secret evidence and no government appeals.

Pakistani authorities have arrested 10 suspected al-Qaida members, including a nephew of detained terror mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The leader of the group responsible for the terrorist outrage in Saudi Arabia in which 22 civilians died was al-Qaida-trained, it has emerged.

The trial of 69 suspected members of a Turkish al-Qaida cell charged in a string of November suicide bombings in Istanbul opened today, but the court quickly ruled that it did not have the authority to hear the case and that any judgment would have to come before another court.

A suicide bomb attack by two suspected Islamic militants on an Istanbul Masonic lodge which killed one person and wounded five others was not believed to be the work of al-Qaida, blamed for a series of suicide bombings in the city last year, authorities said.

The sixth and final member of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell of Americans of Yemeni descent has pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism by attending an al-Qaida training camp shortly before the September 11 attacks.

A SUSPECT in the suicide bombing of an American destroyer off the coast of Yemen in October 2000 was among six suspected al-Qaida men arrested in two simultaneous raids yesterday.

Disclosures about alleged links between Iraq and the al-Qaida terror group have so far been viewed with some scepticism, and been seen as part of an attempt to win over public opinion in the build-up to military action.

A Spanish judge has jailed 16 suspected al-Qaida terrorists pending further investigation and a possible extradition request from French authorities probing a failed bomb plot, court sources said.

A Spanish judge today jailed 16 suspected al-Qaida terrorists pending further investigation and a possible extradition request from French authorities probing a failed bombing plot, court sources said.

Six al-Qaida suspects, including Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant in Yemen, were killed when US forces carried out their first overt strike on the terror group in the Middle East by firing a Hellfire missile on the suspects’ car.

America is refusing to reveal how many inmates it is preparing to release from Cuba.

A Moroccan student accused of aiding the Hamburg terrorist cell involved in the September 11 attacks on the US went to Afghanistan in 2000 and attended a training camp there, his lawyer said yesterday.

Five al-Qaida suspects arrested last week in Pakistan have been handed over to US authorities and flown out of the country.

DOCUMENTS found in raids in Dublin have linked the only man charged over the September 11 attacks on the US with an al-Qaida cell in the city, investigators in the US have claimed.

Saudi Arabia has made its first al-Qaida-related arrests since the September 11 attacks.

Thirteen al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay naval base have been without food for five days in a hunger strike that has encouraged scores of others to skip meals, US military officials said today.

The US Government has released edited videotapes of five suspected al-Qaida members it believes are planning suicide attacks in the future.

Four people were killed today when Yemeni soldiers used tanks and artillery in an effort to arrest at least five suspected supporters of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.