PAKISTAN: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the leading member of al-Qaeda captured in Pakistan last Saturday, was actively plotting attacks against commercial sites in the United States and targets in the Arabian peninsula, US counter-terrorism officials said yesterday.
Intelligence about Mohammed's activities led in part to the "orange" terror alert - the second highest on the US scale - which was kept in place for most of February, officials said.
Security personnel recovered a huge amount of information about al-Qaeda at the house in Pakistan where Mohammed and two others were arrested, a senior US law enforcement official said today. The material recovered included computers, disks, mobile phones and documents which the authorities believe will provide names, locations and potential terrorist plots of al-Qaeda cells in the US and around the world.
There was concern within security circles that the capture of Mohammed might drive some al-Qaeda operatives into hiding. However, the arrest could have the opposite effect of forcing al-Qaeda cells to accelerate plans for attacks in the US or elsewhere rather than risk capture.
Whether the CIA can learn anything useful from the alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks on New york and Washington depends on the skills of the interrogators as well as on Mohammed's willingness to talk.
A primary aim of the questioning will be to gain intelligence to enable the authorities to disrupt any attacks which al-Qaeda may have been intending to carry out in the near future, US counter-terrorism officials said.
A US intelligence memo dated February 26th warned that Mohammed was overseeing plans to have al-Qaeda operatives based in the US attack suspension bridges, petrol stations and power plants in New York and other major cities, Newsweek magazine reported.
Officials refrained from releasing details of Mohammed's detention. Previous high-level al-Qaeda captives have not been brought to the US, where they would have rights not afforded on foreign soil.