Even the most savvy news watchers could be hard pressed to keep up with the recent spate of al-Qaida arrests in Pakistan and Britain. It all began with an announcement on July 29 by Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan's interior minister that after a firefight in Gujrat, Pakistani security forces had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a suspected conspirator in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Immediately following this, Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security issued alerts against possible terrorist attacks on financial centers in New York, New Jersey and Washington. Soon after, the New York Times, quoting unnamed sources mentioned that this alert was based on an arrest a few weeks before in Pakistan of an al-Qaida computer expert named Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan. Simultaneously, British officials reportedly apprehended a major al-Qaida figure named Issa al-Hindi, as well as another man named Babar Ahmad, who is supposedly a cousin of the Pakistani computer expert Noor Khan. Five other British suspects of Pakistani descent reportedly absconded. While these arrests do represent a sizable blow to al-Qaida's network in Pakistan and Britain, they also bring to the fore the organic and symbiotic nexus between al-Qaida and the Pakistani jihadist groups.
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