Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 30, 2002; Page A01
By Karl Vick and Kamran Khan

KARACHI, Pakistan -- While the United States and its military allies continue to hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban foot soldiers in remote areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border, hundreds of al Qaeda operatives are living in Pakistan's urban centers and have cooperated with local militants in several recent attacks, security sources said.

"Local and al Qaeda footprints have been found" in every major strike against so-called soft Western targets in Pakistan this year, said a senior Pakistani security official. Officials have connected al Qaeda to the kidnapping and murder of American newspaper reporter Daniel Pearl in January, a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad on March 17 that left two Americans and three others dead, and a car bombing May 8 outside a hotel in this southern port city that killed 14 people, including 11 French technicians.

In addition, raids by Pakistani and U.S. security agents have uncovered evidence that extensive al Qaeda operations are being planned and carried out from inside this country, a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.

In late March, a raid by Pakistani police and FBI agents in the northeast city of Faisalabad resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaida, the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative to be apprehended since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. More than two dozen other al Qaeda members and a large number of computer disks were seized in the raid.

Here in Karachi, FBI agents accompanied Pakistani police on a raid Sunday night at a religious school, or madrassa, operated by Bangladeshis with suspected connections to al Qaeda. The raid was the first to involve FBI agents in Pakistan since Abu Zubaida's arrest, and it too produced a trove of CD-ROMs and documents containing important al Qaeda information, sources said.

"So many linkages," said Jameel Yusuf, whose Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, a quasi-official assistance group, participated in the probe into the Pearl kidnapping by tracing cell phone calls. "This really scares us."

Investigators tracked every known call placed by men suspected of abducting Pearl, who disappeared in Karachi on Jan. 23. The calls were sorted by number, shaded in pastel and laid out on a matrix covering three oversized pages. In a corner of Page 2 are the 12 calls between one of the accused kidnappers, a rogue policeman named Sheik Adil, and an unidentified employee of the Al-Rashid Trust, an Islamic charity listed by the Bush administration as a source of funding for al Qaeda.

This month, the arrest of a Pakistani militant led to the discovery of remains believed to be Pearl's that were buried five feet beneath a patch of earth owned by Al-Rashid.

Several security officials said that hundreds of al Qaeda operatives who fled Afghanistan have found refuge in the Pakistani cities of Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta. Their hosts, officials said, are Islamic militants who have joined forces with Osama bin Laden's organization, and connections between Pakistani militants and the foreigners who make up al Qaeda stand to increase al Qaeda's effectiveness. Pakistan's Interior Ministry estimated this year that the "trained" members of just five of the country's militant groups numbered 5,000.

"There are scores of Arabs and their Pakistani loyalists who are desperate to blow themselves up to settle scores with the Americans and other Westerners," said a police official who had spoken to Fazal Karim, the militant who confessed to killing Pearl and led authorities to his grave.

The official quoted Karim as saying Arabs in several neighborhoods on the outskirts of Karachi "are on do-or-die missions. The foreign troops and other Westerners are their principal target."

The association between Pakistanis and foreign militants dates to the 1980s, when this country served as a base for Islamic resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed guerrilla war attracted fighters from throughout the Muslim world, most notably Arabs such as bin Laden.

The cooperation has continued even as the focus of jihad, or holy war, has shifted to the West. In fact, until Gen. Pervez Musharraf cut off Pakistan's support for Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia under U.S. pressure after Sept. 11, military intelligence officials routinely dispatched Pakistani militants to guerrilla camps in Afghanistan -- many run by al Qaeda -- for training. At the wedding of a son of bin Laden to a daughter of his then-deputy, Muhammad Atef, in January 2001, 100 of the guests were Pakistanis, who piled off three buses in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

"The alliance has always been there," said a diplomat who has followed Islamic extremism closely on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border.

But what makes the current situation "very dangerous" and "a watershed," the diplomat explained, is fresh evidence that Pakistani militant groups that worked independently -- and toward differing goals -- have coalesced around al Qaeda to combat the United States and its allies, especially Musharraf. Recent attacks carried out principally by Pakistanis show what officials call visible signs of al Qaeda involvement: detailed planning, Western targets and, in the two recent attacks, suicide bombers.

New incidents underscore the threat almost daily. Three men arrested for firing rockets toward the air base used by U.S. troops outside the southern Pakistan city of Jacobabad last week were identified in local press reports as members of Sipah Sahaba Pakistan, a banned Sunni Muslim group that previously had attacked Pakistani Shiites, not Westerners.

The Pearl kidnapping offers the best glimpse into Pakistan's changing underground by clearly illustrating a working alliance between Pakistani Islamic groups that formerly were merely friendly with one another.

The crime was conceived as a warning to the Pakistani government "that our country shouldn't be catering to America's needs," according to a courtroom outburst by Sheik Omar Saeed, who is accused of organizing Pearl's abduction.

Saeed, who served five years in an Indian prison for kidnapping Westerners there, is a prominent member of Jaish-i-Muhammad, one of several Pakistani groups focused on waging war to drive India out of Kashmir, the Muslim-majority region claimed by both India and Pakistan. Now banned but historically supported by Pakistan's government, such jihadi groups send guerrillas from Pakistan's part of Kashmir into India's portion on such raids as the one May 14 that led to the deaths of 34 people and brought the nuclear-armed neighbors to the brink of their fourth war.

But while Saeed boasted of -- then disavowed -- plotting Pearl's kidnapping, authorities long have suspected that the journalist was actually guarded and executed by a second group. Karim, the man who directed police to Pearl's alleged remains, identified the leader of that "operational" cell as Naeem Bukhari, a prominent member of another extremist organization, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi.

Unlike Jaish, Lashkar was never about sending guerrillas into Kashmir. Its obsession was sectarian -- terrorizing members of Pakistan's Shiite Muslim minority, and it boasted of assassinating scores of them in recent years. Yet like Jaish's operatives, many of Lashkar's members found refuge in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

To outsiders, the first sign that the sectarians were working with Jaish came when the suspects named in the May 2000 killing of a Shiite physician, Sibtain Dosa, were identified as bodyguards of Masood Azhar, Jaish's founder and a onetime cellmate of Saeed's.

But the extent of the alliance did not emerge until the Pearl case broke open, in two pieces -- both of which contained links to al Qaeda.

Saeed, during a week in the secret custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency in early February, told of being trained in an al Qaeda camp in Khost, Afghanistan, and boasted of having met bin Laden early in 2001, according to police familiar with the interrogation. A source close to the Pearl investigation said U.S. investigators consider the boast credible. Given his English birth and his record at the London School of Economics, he would have been a prize asset to al Qaeda.

Adil, the rogue policeman, told interrogators that he was among the thousands of Pakistanis who crossed into Afghanistan last fall to defend the Taliban against U.S. attack. He said an instructor in the training camp he attended outside Kabul later turned up as a key organizer in the Pearl kidnapping.

That leader, who may be Lashkar's Bukhari but whom investigators know only by the pseudonym "Farooqi," shared his Karachi living quarters with Arabs, authorities said. Police sources said Karim, the Lashkar activist who claims to have killed Pearl, also was frequently seen with "friends" identified as Arabs.

"Never before have we received so many reports about Arabs being seen in the company of local jihadi elements," said a senior official in Karachi's elite Special Branch police.

The al Qaeda transplants were smuggled in by locals, according to security sources and others, and many were moved through the so-called tribal areas along the Afghan border, a region to which numerous calls from Pearl's kidnappers were placed.

An Islamabad professional, raised in the tribal area of South Waziristan, said several hundred al Qaeda fighters have sought shelter in the area in recent months, a figure that jibes with U.S. intelligence estimates.

"The least people feel they must do is smuggle them out to settled areas," the professional said, adding that a favorite method was including the foreigners in wedding caravans to Karachi, a city of 14 million.

Officials said they see a connection between the al Qaeda fugitives' skills in bomb-making and assassination and the recent church and bus bombings. And Pakistani officials have quoted French intelligence sources as anticipating another terrorist strike inside Pakistan within weeks.

"My sense is that the recent terrorism cases are just the trailer of the movie we may see in the future," said one former Pakistani intelligence official.

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© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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