PESHAWAR, 5 February 2005 — Pakistani police and intelligence agencies have arrested a Tunisian national suspected of links with Al-Qaeda, security officials said yesterday.
The suspect, who identified himself as Abdul Qayum, was arrested late on Wednesday while shopping in a smart district of Peshawar, capital of North-West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan.
“He was being monitored for some time and tracked down to a shop and picked up from there,” the official said.“During the interrogation he said his name was Abdul Qayum, we are looking for more details.”
Pakistan, a key ally of the United States in the war on terror, has arrested more than 500 Al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and handed them over to the United States.
But hundreds of Al-Qaeda militants are still thought to be hiding in major cities and in the rugged border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the group’s leader, Osama Bin Laden.
Visiting Islamabad on Thursday, US Undersecretary for Defense Douglas Feith said Al-Qaeda elements remained in Pakistan and unless more was done to stop the flow of recruits into militant groups the war on terror would never be won.
Meanwhile, the United States placed a newspaper advertisement yesterday offering rewards of millions of dollars for information leading to the arrest of Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda kingpins.
The half-page ad in the Urdu daily Mashriq, published in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border, puts a $25 million price on the head of the 9/11 mastermind and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Featuring black and white mugshots of the wanted men, it also offers $10 million for Mulla Omar, the reclusive one-eyed chief of Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban militia. The ad is the second in a campaign by the US Embassy in Pakistan, a key US ally, to promote Washington’s “Rewards for Justice” program.
The first appeared in the national, mass circulation daily Jang last month but this one is targeted at the Pakistan’s conservative northwest, where many people are thought to sympathize with Bin Laden and the Taleban.
