A senior al Qaeda operative who knew Osama bin Laden and was linked to assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf has been arrested in Dubai and handed over to Islamabad, intelligence sources said on Saturday.
Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a leader of Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, was arrested by authorities in Dubai on Friday after Pakistan had requested his detention, and handed over to Islamabad on Saturday.
The capture was the latest breakthrough in a broadening offensive against terrorist groups in Pakistan that has netted over 20 suspects in recent weeks including computer engineer Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan and top al Qaeda figure Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.
One intelligence source said Khan e-mailed al Qaeda comrades while in custody as part of a sting by security agencies, but his name appeared in US newspapers, which may have compromised the operation, according to experts.
Intelligence services used information gleaned from a spate of high-profile arrests of al Qaeda members in recent weeks, including those of Khan and Ghailani, to track down Akhtar, described by a source as "an operational head of al Qaeda in Pakistan".
He was with al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in Afghanistan at the time of the US-led war against the hard-line militia late in 2001 and fled first to Saudi Arabia and then to United Arab Emirates.
Akhtar is also allegedly linked to two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf in December and a bid to kill Prime Minister-designate Shaukat Aziz in July.
In a separate development, sources said on Saturday that authorities had arrested Fazlur Rehman Khalil, head of the banned Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group.
His arrest will be seen as a warning to other leaders of banned religious outfits that have re-emerged under new names. Some are sectarian, but several have links to al Qaeda.
Ghailani had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for his alleged role in the 1998 East African US embassy bombings.
Information gleaned from Khan led to the arrest of 12 al Qaeda suspects in Britain earlier this week and the decision by the United States to put New York and Washington on high alert against possible al Qaeda attacks.
British newspapers said that among the 12 arrested was senior al Qaeda figure Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eisa al-Hindi, and that he was believed to be plotting an attack on Heathrow airport.