ISLAMABAD, 12 August 2004 — A Turkish man arrested in Pakistan this week is a suspected Al-Qaeda operative closely linked to two of the network’s top planners who were captured in a recent crackdown, security officials said yesterday.

Yilmaz Mehmat, alias Khalid, was one of four Turkish men picked up in Pakistan’s second largest eastern city of Lahore on Sunday over suspicion of links to Osama Bin Laden’s terror network.

The other three had initially been suspected of ties to Al-Qaeda, but after interrogations investigators concluded one of them was running a business and was not linked to Al-Qaeda, a senior interrogator said.

“The two others had arrived in Pakistan a few weeks ago and their interrogation is continuing,” the interrogator speaking on condition of anonymity told AFP.

The other men’s identities were not disclosed but the interrogator said Khalid had been working closely with Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Pakistani computer expert Naeem Noor Khan, who were both taken into custody in July.

Ghailani is a suspect in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa and Khan had been allegedly plotting terror strikes on the United States, Britain and Pakistan.

The interrogator clarified information given by a security official that two of the four Turkish men were “diehard” operatives of Al-Qaeda. He said interrogations revealed that Khalid had fought with the Taleban against US-led forces in Afghanistan and later took part in resistance to Pakistani forces during a military operation in the South Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.

Since mid-July Pakistan has arrested more than 20 Al-Qaeda suspects including Ghailani and Khan. Information collected from Ghailani and Khan led to high security alerts in the US and Britain. President Pervez Musharraf said last week Pakistan was winning the war on terror but warned citizens terrorists could launch retaliatory attacks as they have done in the past.

Meanwhile, authorities detained five men in the southern city of Hyderabad on suspicion they had links to militants close to Al-Qaeda, police said yesterday, but a preliminary inquiry suggested they were counterfeiters. Farid Jan Sarhandi, head of investigation at the Hyderabad city police department, said the men, all Pakistanis, were detained after security agencies had traced some “obnoxious phone calls made by them”.

“We suspect that they have links with militants close to some international terror organization ... maybe also with Al-Qaeda, but we have nothing confirmed as yet,” Sarhandi told Reuters.

Sarhandi said police had also seized five computers, cell phones and a “huge amount of foreign currency” during the raid in which the men were arrested. Hyderabad is about 160 kilometers northeast of the southern port city of Karachi. But a senior police official in Karachi, who asked not to be named, said initial investigations conducted by police had suggested that those detained were in fact counterfeiters.

“Yes, we have detained them on instructions of intelligence agencies and also handed them over to intelligence, but during preliminary investigations we haven’t found links with any militant groups,” the official said. “Apparently they are involved in the fake currency business.”

The Washington Times reported yesterday that Al-Qaeda was plotting a high-profile political assassination in the United States or elsewhere. Citing US intelligence officials, it said a new tape from Bin Laden might surface soon. The newspaper said the assassination plot was among Al-Qaeda plans found on the laptop of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer engineer captured in Pakistan about a month ago.