Alleged al-Qaeda terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was flown out of Pakistan today, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said.
"We have completed our investigation and the man has been flown out of Pakistan," Mr Rashid said.
An official said Mohammed and a second al-Qaeda suspect arrested on Saturday were flown to Afghanistan just after midday (7 a.m. Irish time).
The United States has a detention facility at Bagram Air Base, its headquarters in Afghanistan, which it has used for questioning suspects arrested in the war on terror before their transfer elsewhere.
US military spokesmen at Bagram declined to comment when asked if Mohammed had been brought there.
The Washington Post said in a report last year the Bagram centre was one of a number of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and so not subject to US rules of due process, used by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate terrorist suspects.
It said another was at a US base on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
The US military said the centre was run by the army and not the CIA. It also denied reports of torture at the centres.
The Post said CIA interrogators had used "stress and duress" techniques on prisoners there which blurred the line between the legal and the inhumane.
Citing intelligence specialists said to be familiar with CIA interrogation techniques, the newspaper said captives who refused to cooperate were sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles.
The paper said at times they were held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with lights on 24 hours a day.
Pakistani officials say Mohammed was arrested on Saturday along with two other al Qaeda suspects in the city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
US officials said yesterday they were in a race against time to get information from Mohammed that could foil any plots to attack American targets.