Al-Qaeda target 'in US hands' after capture in Pakistan
PAUL GARWOODIN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
ONE of al-Qaeda's chief idealogues, who has a $5 million bounty on his head and extremist links from Afghanistan to Europe, has been captured in Pakistan and is believed to be in the hands of United States intelligence, it emerged yesterday.
Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al Surim or simply "The Syrian", has been flown out of the country to an unspecified location after being interrogated by Pakistani and US authorities.
Confirmation of his capture lends further credence to Western intelligence claims that many of al-Qaeda's senior figures are now out of action, either detained or dead. An American official said Nasar, a Syrian-Spanish national, was captured in the south-western city of Quetta in November 2005 in a sting operation in which one person was killed.
The raid apparently took place on 3 November, when Pakistani officials said they had captured two possible al-Qaeda suspects and a third man with ties to a Pakistani extremist group.
Nasar, a leading Islamic ideologue wanted by America and Spain, "may have been turned over to the US" after his capture, the American official said.
Pakistan and the US have long been silent on the status of Nasar, described by the US 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 invasion of Afghanistan after the 11 September, 2001, attacks in the US.
Pakistan has captured more than 750 al-Qaeda suspects and handed them over to US authorities for interrogation. These include al-Qaeda's former No3 leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key planner of the 11 September 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 north-west.
US military officials had no immediate information yesterday on whether Nasar was being held at either the Bagram, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison facilities. But a senior intelligence official in Islamabad said that Nasar had been flown out of Pakistan to an undisclosed destination "some time ago". The official added: "I only know that he is not here. But I do know that Syrian authorities had also requested to get him back."
A biography of the red-haired Nasar was recently removed from the US government's Rewards for Justice website. Justice and State Department officials have declined to say why.
Rohan Gunaratna, a specialisthttp://www.authorsden.com/peterpaton on terroism, said Nasar's capture has dealt a major blow to al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic movements, 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 in different countries, particularly the north African region," he 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".
Previous reports have linked Nasar, who lived in London and Spain, to the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, and to the 7 July, 2005 attacks in London that left 56 dead, including the four bombers.
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