Al-Qaida accused made Pakistan visit

A man accused of being a senior al-Qaida operative who was arrested in Britain during anti-terror raids earlier this month secretly visited a remote Pakistani tribal region near Afghanistan in March, a British army spokesman and intelligence source said today.

Abu Eisa al-Hindi met with terror suspects in the South Waziristan region, a hideout and training base for al-Qaida which has been targeted in several Pakistani military operations in recent months, said an intelligence official.

Pakistan army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan confirmed in Islamabad that al-Hindi had paid a “secret” visit to the region in March before “discreetly going back to London”.

He said Pakistan got the information about al-Hindi’s visit to South Waziristan from Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, an alleged al-Qaida computer engineer who was captured by Pakistani intelligence agents on July 13 in the eastern city of Lahore.

Khan later led police to Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who had a €4.5m bounty on his head for his suspected involvement in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in east Africa that killed more than 200 people.

Information from Khan led to the arrest of a dozen suspects in Britain on August 3, including al-Hindi, and prompted a terror alert in the United States.

Al-Hindi is suspected of authoring the surveillance documents recovered from Khan and Ghailani’s computers that sparked the terror alert.

Khan’s computer contained coded e-mails to many other al-Qaida operatives, as well as photographs of Heathrow airport and other potential terrorist targets in Britain and the United States.

The intelligence official said al-Hindi was accompanied by an “explosives expert” on his visit to South Waziristan, but it was not clear if the expert had gone with him from Britain.