Top al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan have fled sanctuaries near the Afghan border to cities and other countries after army raids, President Pervez Mushar-raf said yesterday.
Some of those fleeing were among the 30 or so suspects rounded up by Pakistani security agencies since mid-July, including a communications expert and a Tanzanian suspect in the 1998 East Africa US embassy bombings.
"Authentic information has revealed these terrorist masterminds were relocating from the mountainous and tribal regions in the north to other cities and even other countries," Musharraf told state-run Pakistan Television.
The assaults on Al-Qaeda sanctuaries in February and March in South Waziristan, the remotest of seven tribal districts hugging the porous Afghan border, had sent them scattering across Pakistan and abroad.
"Military operations in Wana, Shakai, Santoi and Mantoi villages in South Waziristan have uprooted these terrorists to move away to other cities and countries," he said.
The captures some months later of computer whiz Naeem Noor Khan and of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the suspect in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings, yielded a trove of information on Osama bin Laden's network.
This in turn led to the reported uncovering of terror plots in Britain, Pakistan and the US, terror alerts in US cities and the arrests of 12 al-Qaeda suspects in Britain, including operative Abu Eisa al-Hindi.
Musharraf traced the al-Qaeda planners' presence in Pakistan to the US-led military campaign to oust Afghanistan's Taliban regime in late 2001.
"These elements came to Afghanistan after the 9/11 events, where the military operations forced them to hide in the mountainous region along the Pak-Afghan border and in cities," he said.
He said top operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubayda had initially hidden in crowded cities.
But their captures in March 2003 and March 2002 respectively from Rawalpindi and Faisalabad had panicked their cohorts into taking refuge in remote frontier tribal areas.
"The capture of 500 to 600 al-Qaeda operatives, including top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh (Mohammed) and Abu Zubayda from different cities, forced them to take refuge mostly in South Waziristan," Musharraf said.
Al-Qaeda operated by using foreign masterminds who enlisted Pakistani militants, he said.
"Masterminds were found to be foreigners who were using local extremists for planning and executing the terrorist activities in the country," he said.
"We are attacking the masterminds to dry up the source of terrorism and they are on the run," he said. "We are on the winning side."
RSS