ISLAMABAD, 31 July 2004 — A top Al-Qaeda operative, one of the world’s most wanted men, has been captured in Pakistan and a senior government minister said yesterday that the network supporting Osama Bin Laden was crumbling. The Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani had a $5 million reward on his head, and is wanted by the United States for his role in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people.
Investigators are scouring a computer and several disks seized when they captured Ghailani and 13 others after a 14-hour gunbattle with security forces last weekend in the city of Gujarat, 175 km (110 miles) southeast of Islamabad, intelligence sources told Reuters on Friday.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said he was sure the African would prove a rich source of information on the Al-Qaeda network that is supporting the fugitive Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahri.
Both are believed to be hiding out in rugged mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. “Osama Bin Laden or Al-Zawahri don’t work in isolation,” Hayat said. “They work through these networks.” The minister said those networks are “obviously in the process of crumbling at this point of time.”
“We have certainly gained important and valuable information as a result of these arrests,” the minister said. Intelligence sources said Ghailani had been flushed out of South Waziristan, a Pashtun tribal region on the border with Afghanistan, where the army has launched two major offensives since March. He had been hiding out in Gujarat for the past month and a half.
The intelligence source said Ghailani was captured along with his Uzbek wife and two South Africans after his driver led police to his hideout. Among those found in the house were three women and five children.
Ghailani had brought two other foreign comrades to his safe house after the group became nervous that security forces were closing in on the hotel in Gujarat where they had been staying, the intelligence source said. The security forces have also caught his local contact, Ejaz Warraich, a member of Millat-e-Islamia, a group formerly known by the name Sipah-e-Sahaba, a hardcore Sunni group whose main targets have been members of Pakistan’s minority Shi’ite Muslim sect. Warraich rented the safe house for Ghailani.
Ghailani, who is in his early 30s and goes by the nicknames “Foopie” and “Ahmed the Tanzanian”, was indicted in New York in 1998 for the synchronized blasts that blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
He reportedly could not drive a car at the time of the bombings, but Ghailani is probably the most senior Al-Qaeda operative caught in Pakistan since the arrest in March 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
“It is a big achievement for our security forces,” Hayat said. The minister said the capture of Ghailani was solely down to Pakistan’s security forces, and there was no help from US intelligence.
Pakistan had not yet received a request from the United States for Ghailani’s extradition, Hayat said. “He has been in Pakistan for some time. We have to establish the exact nature of his activities and scope of his network in Pakistan. Only after we have exhausted our inquiries shall we be able to hand him over ... to the US,” he said.
In Zanzibar, the weeping mother of Ghailani said her son was a harmless, religious boy who had gone abroad to study. “The day he left, he hugged me and said he was going for studies,” Bimkubwa Said Abdallah told Reuters “I received this news today (of his capture) and I’m in shock,” Said said.
