ISLAMABAD, 8 January 2005 — The United States yesterday advertised rewards in a top Pakistani daily for information leading to the capture of 14 Al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders including Osama Bin Laden and Mulla Omar.
The half-page advert in the Urdu language newspaper Jang, placed by the US Embassy in Islamabad, features mug shots of the wanted men and said anyone giving details to a special e-mail address or hot lines would remain anonymous.
The United States has offered up to $25 million each for 9/11 mastermind Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, while Taleban chief Omar has a $10-million price on his head. The unusual step represents a renewed effort to track down the main Al- Qaeda hierarchy, amid fears that Bin Laden’s trail has gone cold three years after the hard-line Taleban were ousted in neighboring Afghanistan.
The US Embassy said in a statement that the ad was the first in a series appearing in newspapers and on radio and television, and part of what it called the ongoing war against terrorism. It was designed to promote awareness of the US Rewards for Justice program and to “urge people to bring some of the most wanted international terrorists to justice”.
The embassy list also contained one new face with a reward of five million dollars for the capture of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab Al-Suri, a 46-year-old Syrian suspected of involvement in the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people. Nasar is alleged to have trained Al-Qaeda militants at the Derunta and Al- Ghuraba camps in Afghanistan.
Pakistan, a crucial US ally, has already captured around 600 Al-Qaeda men including some key operatives but the most senior figures have eluded the dragnet.
US officials believe they are hiding somewhere in the mountains on the porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, although all the key seizures to date have been in crowded Pakistani cities.
Jang, with a circulation of nearly three million, is also widely read in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region along the border, where Pakistani troops have conducted operations since late 2003 to capture or kill Al-Qaeda fugitives. The other suspects in the US advertisement each carry a reward of five million dollars for “terrorist” activities such as making explosives, training and methods of using poison for terror attacks. Similar ads have appeared in publications as far-ranging as The New York Times, Paris Match, Germany’s Die Welt, Pravda in Russia and the Egyptian paper Al-Hayat, the embassy statement said.
