'Most-wanted' terror suspect handed to US

A Tanzanian al-Qaida operative on the FBI list of most wanted terrorists has been handed over to US officials and flown out of Pakistan, a security official said today.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is wanted in connection with the 1998 US embassy bombings in east Africa that killed more than 200 people. He was arrested in Pakistan by intelligence agents last July after a shootout in the eastern city of Gujrat.

Since then, officials have refused to divulge the whereabouts of Ghailani, who had a five-million-dollar bounty on his head.

But today, a senior security official confirmed that the suspect had left Pakistan.

“He (Ghailani) was turned over to our American friends months ago,” the security official told The Associated Press.

The official would not say whether Ghailani had been shifted to the US high-security detention facility for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“We have no idea, and as a matter of fact we don’t ask such questions,” he said. He gave no other details.

A US embassy spokesman said he had no information about Ghailani's whereabouts.

Ghailani, believed to be between 30 and 34, is one of the FBI’s 22 most wanted terror suspects. He has been indicted in New York for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. Twelve Americans were among the 200-plus people killed.

At the time of his arrest, about 15 other people, including women and children, were also captured. It’s unclear what has happened to them.

After Ghailani’s capture, intelligence officials said that they found “valuable information”, including plans for attacks against the United States and Britain, on a computer recovered from a house where Ghailani had been staying.

Officials said that Ghailani was captured on a tip given to Pakistani officials by Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani and alleged al Qaida computer expert, who was arrested about two weeks before him in the eastern city of Lahore.

Pakistan, which became a key ally of the United States in its war on terror after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, has so far arrested more than 600 al-Qaida suspects from different parts of the country.

They include al-Qaida number three, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested in March 2003 during a raid in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital, Islamabad. Almost all the foreign suspects, including Mohammed, were later handed over to US officials.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri remain at large. They are still suspected to be hiding in the rugged border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.