THAILAND: Hambali, the suspected leader of south-east Asia's terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah, may have been helping to plan a new September 11th-style attack before his arrest in Thailand, according to US officials.
A senior US official said that shortly after September 11th Hambali was asked by al-Qaeda to recruit new pilots for another wave of aircraft hijackings in the US and that an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan had recently sent Hambali "a large sum of money for a major attack".
Hambali, the only non-Arab to sit on al-Qaeda's military council, was last night under "joint interrogation in an allied country", said Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's Prime Minister. Mr Alexander Downer, Australia's Foreign Minister, described Hambali as "the Osama bin Laden of south-east Asia". However, regional terrorism experts said the capture could provoke Jemaah Islamiah to accelerate attacks because of fears Hambali could divulge information about planned activities.
Thai officials say Hambali was taken into custody early this week in Ayutthaya, the Buddhist temple town north of Bangkok.
Remaining at large are the group's three alleged main bombmakers. They include Azahari Husin, a former Malaysian professor of statistics, and Dulmatin, an Indonesian allegedly involved in the Bali blast. Another explosives expert, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, escaped from a Manila jail last month.
Hambali, a 39-year-old Indonesian cleric whose real name is Riduan Isamuddin, is believed to have been the mastermind of the bombing last October of a Bali nightclub, which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.