An al-Qaeda suspect was killed and another arrested in Pakistan, and authorities tried to determine on Thursday if the detained man is a Syrian who has a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head and once taught militants at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan.
Intelligence officials said a third man, linked to a Pakistani extremist group, was also captured in Tuesday's raid on a shop that was also the office of an Islamic charity linked to a hardline militant group.
The raid was in Quetta, capital of Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan.
"I can only confirm that there was an encounter, and our security forces arrested one suspected al-Qaeda terrorist while another terrorist was killed," said Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.
He said it would "take some time" to confirm their identities.
Authorities were investigating whether one of the suspects is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, 47, a Syrian native who also holds Spanish citizenship, said a senior government official.
Intelligence officials said that the detained man has been "tightlipped and very uncooperative" during interrogations.
The US Justice Department has offered US$5 million for information leading to Nasar's arrest, describing him as an al-Qaeda member and former trainer at terrorist camps in Afghanistan who helped train extremists in using poisons and chemicals.
The department's Rewards for Justice Web site also says he is probably in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Media reports have linked Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, to the Mar. 11, 2004, Madrid bombings that left 191 people dead and more than 1,500 injured, and to this year's July 7 bombings in London that left 56 people dead, including the four bombers.
Police in Madrid said they have no confirmation that the suspect under arrest is Nasar. London's Metropolitan Police and the Home Office could not immediately comment on Britain's interest in Nasar.
Intelligence officials in Quetta said authorities got a tip that al-Qaeda members were visiting the shop, and decided to launch the raid on Tuesday.
Residents in Quetta's Sarki Road neighborhood said they saw Pakistani intelligence agents raiding the shop and dragging some men into a vehicle when gunshots rang out.
A witness, Mohammed Salahuddin, said some passers-by were hit, and one of the arrested men -- whose face had been covered with a black hood by the intelligence agents -- was bleeding.
"I was buying something when security officials suddenly entered the shop and overpowered two or three people. When they were throwing them in two vehicles, I heard gunshots and some passers-by fell down," Salahuddin said. "I don't know who opened the fire."
There was no official confirmation that any passers-by were injured in the raid.
An intelligence official in Quetta said the al-Qaeda suspect who died in the shootout was a Saudi named Sheikh Ali Mohammed al-Salim. The official said al-Salim had been living with Nasar.
He said the third man was a suspected member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistani Islamic militant group allegedly linked to al-Qaeda.
US Embassy officials said they could not confirm the arrests.
Bari Dad, owner of the property where the raid took place, said he had rented the shop to a man he identified as Abdul Hanan. Dad said Hanan had also used it as an office for the Madina Trust, a Pakistani charity that is linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Another resident, Nizam Din, said he believed Hanan -- apparently the third suspect mentioned by intelligence officials -- had links with Jaish-e-Mohammed, and helped recruit fighters for the wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
China has possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China said in a report on Thursday. The bipartisan commission said that new evidence had last year emerged that “crimes against humanity — and possibly genocide — are occurring” in Xinjiang. It also accused China of harassing Uighurs in the US. China has been widely condemned for setting up complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, which others have called concentration camps. The UN says that
A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000km Pacific Ocean crossing from the US to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird yesterday said he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 last year had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe — after US president-elect Joe Biden — hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. Joe’s feat has attracted the attention
Australian scientists have raised questions over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine in establishing herd immunity, calling for a pause on its widespread rollout as the country recorded one new case of the virus yesterday. Opposition to the vaccine casts a cloud over Australia’s immunization plans, with 53 million doses of the AstraZeneca jab already on hand. “The question is really whether it is able to provide herd immunity. We are playing a long game here. We don’t know how long that will take,” Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology president Stephen Turner said. Turner added
The Polish Supreme Court on Friday quashed a lower court’s green light for the extradition of a businessman to China for alleged fraud, a charge he has denied, saying that he is being targeted for supporting Falun Gong. Polish authorities took Chinese-born Swedish citizen Li Zhihui, now 53, into custody in 2019 on an international warrant issued by China for alleged non-payment in a business deal, Krzysztof Kitajgrodzki, his Polish lawyer, told reporters. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the case would return to a lower appellate court for review. Kitajgrodzki told reporters that it was still not a given that his client
RSS