A TOP Arab al-Qaida operative was among six militants killed overnight in a suspected US missile strike in north-west Pakistan, a senior security official said yesterday.

Al-Qaida’s chief ideologue and strategist, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has published a 212-page book on militant Islamic websites slamming his former radical colleagues in Egyptian prisons for disavowing armed struggle and turning their backs against violence.

A missile from a US Predator drone struck a suspected terrorist safehouse in Pakistan and killed a top al-Qaida commander believed responsible for a bomb attack during a visit last year by Vice President Dick Cheney to Afghanistan, a US official said yesterday.

Al-Qaida number two Ayman al-Zawahiri called for attacks against France in a video and designated an Algerian insurgency movement as the terrorist organisation’s armed wing in the European country, a terror expert said today.

An audiotape purported to be from Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahri that aired on an Arabic television channel today criticised France’s decision to ban Islamic headscarves in schools as part of the West’s campaign against Islam.

Swiss authorities involved in the global hunt for terror money have established that both Osama bin Laden and suspected al-Qaida No 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri had links to Swiss bank accounts.

Two key suspects in the Istanbul suicide bombings, in which 61 people died, took instructions from Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, newspapers reported today.

Just weeks before terrorists bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Osama bin Laden declared war on the West.

American intelligence officials have translated a 100-page document they describe as Osama bin Laden’s top deputy’s ‘‘last will’’, it emerged today.

American president George Bush today braced the American people for US military action outside Afghanistan.

The US Department of Defence has claimed that Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden’s deputy may