ISLAMABAD - Pakistan this week arrested a suspected member of the al Qaeda terrorist network said to have "a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head".
Government officials said last Tuesday that arrests over the previous three days in Pakistan followed on from an earlier sweep for militants which had led to information of a possible attack in the US and to a subsequent upgrading of the state of alert in the US.
"We have arrested in the past 24 hours in the Punjab, another two people of African origin who, in our view, have links to al Qaeda," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said.
"Before that, another person was arrested who has a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head." The minister declined to give any further details on the big catch.
The crackdown on militants in Pakistan has apparently gathered pace since the capture of a computer engineer who acted as an e-mail postman for the groups by distributing coded messages. The New York Times said he had been caught in mid-July.
US officials said information from that arrest, and from the later capture of senior al Qaeda member Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, prompted them to issue a high alert warning to financial institutions in Washington, New York and New Jersey early this week.
One of those arrested was a policeman suspected of passing information to al Qaeda plotters planning to assassinate the Chief Minister of Punjab Province, Chaudhary Pervez Elahi.
One of the foreigners was arrested at a bus stop in the town of Hafizabad in Punjab province. Intelligence sources named him as Jummah Ibrahim and said he was from Sierra Leone.
The sources said the suspect had first claimed he was from Yemen and then Egypt.
The other foreigner was an al Qaeda suspect arrested along with two Pakistanis travelling to the eastern city of Lahore in the Punjab from the town of Sheikupura on Monday night.
One intelligence official said the Pakistanis belonged to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a local Sunni Muslim militant group, and that one had a bounty of 500,000 rupees (US$8,532) on his head.
Two AK-47 rifles, 150 rounds of ammunition, half a dozen grenades and several documents were found in their vehicle.
Policeman arrested
The policeman was arrested in Lahore at the weekend, interior ministry spokesman Abdul Rauf Chaudhry said.
Another intelligence official said he had been caught passing on information about the Punjab's chief minister's travel routes to al Qaeda plotters. The official said more police may be arrested.
Pakistan's Prime Minister-designate Shaukat Aziz escaped unhurt last week after a suicide bomb attack while he was on the campaign trail in the Punjab. At least nine people were killed in the attack, claimed by a group with purported links to al Qaeda.
A week ago, Pakistani security forces nabbed Tanzanian-born Ghailani, who carried a $5 million reward on his head, and 13 others following a firefight in Gujarat, a town in Punjab which is 175km (110 miles) southeast of Islamabad.
Ghailani was wanted by the US for his suspected role in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people.
Intelligence sources said they also seized a computer and more than a hundred disks when they caught him.
The Washington Post, however, said the initial breakthrough in Pakistan came from the capture of Musaad Aruchi, a nephew of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Karachi on June 12.
The newspaper quoted Pakistani intelligence sources as saying that his arrest gave them access to a host of documents, e-mail addresses and cell-phone text messages that gave them clues to an al Qaeda plan to strike at targets in New York and Washington.
According to Pakistani officials, Aruchi was both a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammad and a cousin of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who carried out a 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
Mohammad was arrested in the northern Pakistan city of Rawalpindi in March last year, while Yousef is serving a life sentence in the US.
(Agencies via Xinhua)
