Al-Qaeda's leaders are holed up in a secure hide-out in Pakistan, from which they are revitalizing their bruised but resilient network, US intelligence chief John Negroponte said on Thursday.
In an unusually direct statement on the whereabouts of the militant group's top echelon, Negroponte told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Pakistan is the center of a web of al-Qaeda connections that stretches across the globe into Europe.
"Al-Qaeda is the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to US interests," the US director of national intelligence said in his annual assessment of worldwide threats against the US and its interests.
"They are cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe," he said.
It appeared to be the first time in congressional testimony that Negroponte has singled out Pakistan as the locale for the headquarters of the network.
Al-Qaeda is accused of perpetrating the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.
Up to now, US officials have said that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri are hiding somewhere along the rugged mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Negroponte did not cite bin Laden or Zawahiri by name and did not say where in Pakistan US intelligence believes al-Qaeda leaders are hiding.
Negroponte, who became US intelligence chief in April last year and will soon leave to become deputy secretary of state, told the same panel a year ago that al-Qaeda's leadership posed a threat to the US from bases in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
"We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qaeda operatives, but al-Qaeda's core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties," he said on Thursday.
US officials have long complained about Islamist militant activity in Pakistan, which has been blamed as a source of increasing Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.
Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency also testified to the committee.
His statement said that while Pakistani aid has led to the arrest or killing of many terrorists, Pakistan's border with Afghanistan "remains a haven for al-Qaeda's leadership and other extremists."
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