U.S. agents and Pakistani authorities were interrogating one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants after the al Qaeda figure's capture this week, intelligence sources said on Friday. Pakistan says Libyan militant Abu Faraj Farj al Libi orchestrated at least two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf, while U.S. officials describe him as the successor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the Al Qaeda No. 3 arrested in Pakistan in March 2003.Speaking during a visit to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said: "I know that interrogations are going on and that they are proceeding well." Intelligence sources say al Liby is a friend of Mohammed, the alleged brain behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. "U.S. intelligence agents have been part of the operation to catch al Liby," said one intelligence official. "Al Liby is being interrogated jointly by a U.S. and Pakistani team." Al Liby was captured in Pakistan's rugged North West Frontier Province on Monday with a handful of fighters, including an as yet unidentified al Qaeda figure who also carries a U.S. reward of several million dollars, one senior Pakistani official said. The Libyan's association with bin Laden dates to the jihad, or holy war, that the United States covertly backed against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and to Sudan, where the al Qaeda chief and his cohorts was based in the early 1990s.
Prime Minister Aziz, who narrowly survived a suicide bomb attack that killed his driver in July last year, was at best non-committal when asked by reporters whether al Liby might lead investigators to bin Laden. "We have no idea about bin Laden. But certainly Mr Al Liby was a senior member of al Qaeda and we were on the lookout for him for a while and interrogations are in progress," Aziz said. More than 20 suspects have been arrested since al Liby's capture, including eight in Lahore on Wednesday night. One of those, a Pakistani with links to al Qaeda, also had a bounty on him, an intelligence source said. But how many of the suspects detained are actual al Qaeda members, Arab or foreign nationals who have joined bin Laden's Islamist network, is unknown.
President Musharraf has repeatedly said his security forces have "broken the back" of al Qaeda and its allies among Pakistan's militant groups over the past year. Musharraf is regarded as a key U.S. ally and a bulwark against Islamist militancy in Pakistan, while his efforts to make peace over Kashmir with India has made some extremists hate him even more. Pakistan has decimated al Qaeda in the past three years, arresting and killing hundreds of militants, but bin Laden's network struck back by enlisting Pakistani fighters. Bin Laden had a ready-made pool of recruits in Pakistan, as its Sunni Muslim extremist groups share a similar world view, while militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir attended al Qaeda training camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border before 2001. Most captured al Qaeda members have been handed over to the United States, but the homegrown militants, some of whom had been used by Pakistani intelligence before Musharraf joined the U.S.-led war on terror, fall in a different category.
