Musharraf hails death of al-Qaida chief

PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf yesterday hailed the killing of top al-Qaida operative Amjad Hussain Farooqi as a breakthrough and predicted it would lead to more high-profile arrests.

Farooqi, who was wanted for his alleged role in the 2002 kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and in two assassination attempts on Gen Musharraf in December 2003, was shot dead during a four-hour gunbattle on Sunday after vowing never to surrender.

Three other Pakistanis, one of them an Islamic cleric, were arrested.

Mr Pearl's captors beheaded the journalist and released a videotape of the killing. Four Islamic militants have been convicted of his kidnapping but seven other suspects including those who allegedly slit his throat remain at large.

"We eliminated one of the very major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only involved on attacks on me but also on attacks elsewhere in the country. So a very big terrorist has been eliminated," Gen Musharraf told reporters in the Netherlands while travelling home from New York.

Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said Farooqi was also linked to recent attacks on US forces across the border in Afghanistan.

He said that Farooqi was also believed to have been involved in an attack in 2002 on a church in Islamabad that killed two Americans and three Pakistanis.

He also said Farooqi had links to other al-Qaida figures like former number three Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested in March 2003, and Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian believed to be a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden.

Following the raid, Pakistani forces arrested four more suspects yesterday.

Pakistan has arrested more than 600 al-Qaida suspects, including several senior figures in the terror network. Many have been handed over to US authorities.

Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahri, are both believed to be hiding in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, although there has been no hard evidence for years.

Asked about bin Laden's whereabouts, Gen Musharraf said he was uncertain. "Oh no, I don't know where he is," he said. "I wish I did."

Gen Musharraf's decision to ally Pakistan with Washington's campaign against international terrorism has enraged Islamic militants, and police stepped up patrols in case of a backlash over Farooqi's death in Nawabshah, a town about 125 miles north of Karachi.

The US Embassy in Islamabad issued a renewed travel warning, urging Americans to keep a low profile in Pakistan and stressing that its staff might not be able to help anyone in rural areas.

Pakistani officials said they were awaiting DNA tests to definitively confirm that the man killed on Sunday was Farooqi, but expressed confidence that it was him.

Farooqi, thought to be 32, was born in a village in eastern Punjab province. His family says he was radicalised by a visit to Kashmir, where he trained with Islamic militants who are fighting Indian security forces in India's portion of that Himalayan region. He later visited Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.