Pakistan has arrested a suspected member of al Qaeda with a multi-million dollar price on his head along with several others.
Arrests over the last three days in Pakistan follow on from an earlier sweep for militants which led to information of a possible attack in the United States and a subsequent increase in the US state of alert.
"We have arrested in the past 24 hours from Punjab another two people of African origin who in our view have links to al Qaeda," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told Reuters.
"Before that another person was arrested who has a multi-million dollar bounty on his head," the minister added, but he declined to give any further details on the big catch.
The crackdown on militants in Pakistan has apparently gathered pace since the capture of a computer engineer who acted as an e-mail postman for the groups by distributing coded messages. The New York Times said he was arrested in mid-July.
US officials say information from that arrest, and from the later capture of senior al Qaeda member Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, prompted them to issue a high alert warning to financial institutions in Washington, New York and New Jersey.
One of those arrested was a policeman suspected of passing information to al Qaeda plotters planning to assassinate the Chief Minister of Punjab province, Chaudhary Pervez Elahi.
One of the foreigners was arrested at a bus stop in the town of Hafizabad in Punjab province. Intelligence sources named him as Jummah Ibrahim and said he was from Sierra Leone.
The sources said the suspect had first claimed he was from Yemen and then Egypt.
The other foreigner was an al Qaeda suspect arrested along with two Pakistanis travelling to the eastern city of Lahore in Punjab from the town of Sheikupura on Monday night.