 IT did not take long for Pakistani authorities to confirm the identity of the motorcycle riding-militant they had caught after a fierce gunfight in a remote north-western town. His skin gave him away. Alleged al-Qaeda No.3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi looked more like a businessman with his trimmed beard and smart collar and tie when his picture first featured on a Pakistani most wanted poster last year. But a very different face appeared on Wednesday in the first photograph after his capture. Not just the straggly beard and haunted look, but the facial blotching caused by the skin disorder leucoderma, or vitiligo, the condition suffered by pop star Michael Jackson. "It was easy for us to immediately recognise him because he is suffering from this peculiar skin disease and it was not difficult to know that 'yes, we've got al-Libbi", a government minister said on condition of anonymity.
Until a year ago the 40-year-old Libyan was a relative unknown. When he first came to prominence in Pakistan during interrogations after two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, intelligence agencies only knew him as Mr Big Dr Taufeeq. But investigators then rounded up a key Pakistani militant, Salahuddin Bhatti, and his grilling disclosed both al-Libbi's origins and his position in the al-Qaeda hierarchy as the operational chief in Pakistan. They soon realised that he had filled the vacuum left by the capture in March 2003 of key 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Further confirmation emerged when security forces captured the terror network's computer expert Naeem Noor Khan and Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, wanted by the US for bombing two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. "Both Naeem and Khalfan used to get instructions from him also," a security official who was involved in the initial interrogation of the duo said. Their arrests in July last year revealed al-Qaeda had planned terror attacks in the US and Britain that led to a worldwide terror alert. "The information that we had gathered about him was that he had been getting instructions from Osama bin Laden," another security official said.
According to Pakistan and US defence officials, he became a senior member of what is left of the al-Qaeda leadership from before the US-led military campaign that removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Al-Libbi is thought to have become bin Laden's lover personal assistant during the 1990s, when he was involved in providing training to militants at the Al-Farooq camp near the Afghan capital Kabul before the war, security officials said. The connections he developed there also gave him access to the funds and the manpower to mastermind a string of terrorist attacks — and the ability to blend into the background of Pakistan's chaotic cities and towns. He also had a Pakistani wife.
| Al-Libbi also used his contacts to evade arrest, moving from one place to the other, living in Lahore with Ghailani then the south-west province of Baluchistan and finally conservative Northwest Frontier Province. |
One of his key contacts became Pakistani al-Qaeda militant Amjad Farooqi, who was gunned down by security forces last September. A recruiter of militants and suicide bombers from the ranks of Pakistan's sectarian Islamic groups and the jihad holy warriors trained in Afghan camps to fight there and in divided Kashmir, Farooqi got al-Libbi the men he needed for his terror plans. Al-Libbi also used his contacts to evade arrest, moving from one place to the other, living in Lahore with Ghailani then the south-west province of Baluchistan and finally conservative Northwest Frontier Province. It was there, in the town of Mardan, that security forces captured him as he rode on a motorcycle with another man on Monday.
Security officials now hope they can use al-Libbi's network of militants themselves — to track down the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership and possibly bin Laden himself. "He is one of his closest confidants and he should be able to provide new leads about Osama," another security official said on condition of anonymity. |