Indian Express : London plot’s India link: key suspect is Jaish man from Pak

London plot’s India link: key suspect is Jaish man from Pak

New York Times | August 13, 2006

LONDON, AUGUST 12: Rashid Rauf, the British national who was arrested in Pakistan and who appears to be a crucial player in the plot to blow up as many as 10 passenger jets bound for the United States, is affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed, Pakistani officials said.

Rauf was arrested Wednesday in the eastern city of Bahawalpur, the officials said, just hours before the authorities began a series of raids across Britain to break up the plot.

Jaish-e-Mohammed (founded by Maulana Mazood Azhar, released in the IC 814 hijack deal) has been officially labeled a terrorist group by the United States government and is believed to be responsible for the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Its precursor organization, Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. American and Pakistani officials believe that Rauf trained in camps of Al Qaeda in the late 1990s or later, when that group and other militant organizations operated freely in Afghanistan.(British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that the five Pakistani ‘‘facilitators’’ arrested, too, belong to Jaish.)

According to a former Pakistani official close to the intelligence services there, the information leading to the arrest of Rauf came from a mole planted by the British police who had been monitoring the plot inside the United Kingdom. With Rauf safely in hand, British authorities on Thursday swept up 24 suspects who they say were planning to carry liquid explosives onto passenger airliners and detonate them as the planes flew to the United States.

American and Pakistani officials said they decided to arrest the 24 suspects, in part because they were concerned that word of Rauf’s arrest could send the British plotters underground. The officials described Rauf, who is of Pakistani descent, as a hardened Islamic militant who had been acting as a liaison for Al Qaeda in its relations with the plotters in the UK. ‘‘There is definitely an Al Qaeda connection to this,’’ Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said.

In another interview, Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, the Pakistani interior minister, called Rauf a ‘‘key Al Qaeda operative.’’ US officials in Washington concurred that Rauf was believed to be a principal facilitator in the plot to blow up the airliners and that he was affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Neighbors in Birmingham said Rauf was the brother of Tayib Rauf, one of the 24 arrested in the dragnet Thursday. A US official confirmed it. A Pakistani official in the UK and a Western intelligence official said Rauf was also wanted for the murder (of his uncle, reported The Daily Telegraph) in the UK. The British police said late on Friday they had released one of the 24 suspects in the case. They did not identify that person.

Pakistani official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Pakistani government had also picked up one other British-born man in connection with the plot, as well as at least five Pakistanis.

Still, the exact nature of Rauf’s role in the plot was not immediately clear. US officials said that at least two of the 24 arrested Thursday had travelled to Pakistan in the weeks leading up to the planned attack. It was unclear Friday whether those two suspects met with Rauf while they travelled to Pakistan, or what they did while they were there.

Pakistani and American officials said they had received another early warning of the plot in Britain from a Pakistani man picked up crossing the Afghan border five weeks ago. According to the former Pakistani official, the man told authorities there of a plot in Britain involving the destruction of several commercial airlines.

-ALAN COWELL, DEXTER FILKINS & MARK MAZZETTI

editor@expressindia.com