Associated Press | May 02, 2006KABUL, Afghanistan - A top al-Qaida leader with a $5 million bounty on his head and extremist links from Afghanistan to Europe has been captured in Pakistan, a U.S. law enforcement official has confirmed for the first time.
Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a Syrian-Spanish national, has also been flown out of the country to an unspecified location after being interrogated by Pakistani and American authorities.
Terror analysts said Nasar's capture has dealt a major blow to al-Qaida and other militant movements he aided through his virulent anti-Western writings and weapons training.
The American official, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Nasar, who is also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, was captured in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in November 2005 in a sting operation that sparked a gunfight in which one person was killed.
The raid apparently took place on Nov. 3, when Pakistani officials said they had captured two possible al-Qaida suspects and a third man with ties to a Pakistani extremist group. Intelligence officials had said they were investigating whether one of the suspects was Nasar.
Nasar, a leading Islamic ideologue wanted by American and Spanish authorities for terror-related activities, "may have been turned over to the U.S." after his capture, the official told The AP late last week. He could not say where Nasar may have been sent to.
Pakistani and American officials have long been tightlipped on the status of Nasar, described by the U.S. Justice Department as a former trainer at Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan who helped teach extremists to use poisons and chemicals before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Pakistan, a close U.S. ally in its war on terror, has previously captured more than 750 al-Qaida suspects, among them top leaders, and handed them over to American authorities for interrogation.
These include al-Qaida's former No. 3 leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, who was arrested in March 2003 during a raid near Islamabad, and his purported replacement, Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who was detained in May 2005 in Pakistan's northwest.
U.S. military officials aware of the detention of terror suspects at American prison facilities in Bagram, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had no immediate information Tuesday on whether Nasar had been incarcerated at either jail.
But a senior Pakistani intelligence official told The AP from the capital, Islamabad, that Nasar had been flown out of Pakistan to an undisclosed destination "some time ago."
"I only know that he is not here. But, I do know that Syrian authorities had also requested to get him back," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitive nature of his work.
Another Pakistani official confirmed the Quetta arrest but had no information on Nasar's whereabouts.
"He had been interrogated by us. He had been interrogated by our American friends," said the official, who also declined to be identified because of the secretive nature of his activities. He added that both Syrian and U.S. authorities wanted to take Nasar into custody.
Syrian authorities were not immediately available for comment. Spain's ambassador to Pakistan, Jose-Maria Robles, said his country had sought information from Pakistan about Nasar's reported arrest in November but had received no official reply.
"Pakistan knows our interest," he said in Islamabad on Tuesday.
A picture and short biography of the red-haired Nasar was recently removed from the U.S. government's Rewards for Justice Web site. Justice and State Department officials declined to say why Nasar was no longer profiled online. The U.S. had offered a US$5 million (?4.2 million) reward for his arrest.
Singapore-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna said Nasar's capture has dealt a major blow to al-Qaida and other radical Islamic movements at large as he was the "most prolific writer" of jihadi propaganda and held close links with extremists throughout Europe and South Asia.
"The ideologues are as equally important as the operational people and he was in close contact with very prominent figures with movements in different countries, particularly the North African region," Gunaratna said.
In 2004, Nasar released a 1,600-page book titled "The International Islamic Resistance Call," which lays out strategies for attacking Islam's enemies. He lists those as "Jews, Americans, British, Russian and any and all of the NATO countries, as well as any country that takes the position of oppressing Islam and Muslims," according to a translation from the Washington-based SITE Institute.
Media reports have linked Nasar, who lived in London and Spain and was married to a Spanish woman, to the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, and to the July 7, 2005, attacks in London that left 56 dead, including the four bombers.
In September 2003, Nasar was among 35 people named in an indictment handed down by a Spanish magistrate for terrorist activities connected to al-Qaida. His exact role, if any, to either the Madrid or London bombings is unclear.
He is also wanted for a 1985 attack on a restaurant near a military base close to Madrid airport that killed about 20 people - regarded as the first international Islamic terrorist attack to take place in Spain.
Nasar spent time in London during the mid-1990s before traveling to Afghanistan where he was believed to have been part of bin Laden's network, a Western diplomat in Islamabad said. His movements have been traced to Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and at least two European capitals.
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