Pakistan has said it will only consider extraditing a senior al-Qaeda suspect after its own interrogation of the man is complete, while top government officials said his arrest shows Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network is crumbling.
A top Pakistani security official told reporters on Friday that the information that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was providing to his interrogators has already been shared with American intelligence, and that experts had begun to scour computer hard drives and diskettes found during his arrest.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat said the arrest was a "great blow to the al-Qaeda" network of Osama bin Laden, but refused to say whether Ghailani had any knowledge of the terror leader's whereabouts.
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the rugged mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, though there is no hard evidence of his location.
"Pakistan is determined to flush out terrorists from its soil and dismantle their network definitively," Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said, in reference to al-Qaeda.
"The latest arrests indicate that the network is crumbling down," he said.
Ghailani, one of the FBI's 22 most wanted terrorists and a man with a US$25 million bounty on his head, has been indicted in the Southern District of New York for his alleged role in the 1998 twin US embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. He could face the death penalty.
Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Rauf Chaudhry said his government had not yet received any request from Washington for Ghailani's extradition.
He said Pakistan would consider extradition: "But, first we would like to interrogate him thoroughly to check his links with other people in Pakistan."
Meanwhile, Tanzanian police spokesman Ernest Saria said his country had not yet decided whether to seek custody of Ghailani or clear his extradition to America.
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