LONDON – Investigators have identified the leader of an alleged terrorist cell broken up by police here 10 days ago and have traced his contacts to Pakistan, where U.S., British and Pakistani intelligence agents are pursuing the man’s suspected connections with al-Qaida.

The man, Ali Ahmed Khan, who was taken into custody with other purported cell members but whose name has not been made public, was acting as the chief “facilitator” of an alleged plot to bomb several trans-Atlantic airliners headed for the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence official.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, compared Khan to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian university student who, acting on instructions from top-ranking al-Qaida members in Afghanistan, organized the Sept. 11 hijacking plot that killed more than 3,000 people.

“He is a cell leader in Britain,” the U.S. official said.

The question the authorities are trying to answer, he said, is: “How strong an al-Qaida affiliation does he have?”

The U.S. official said Khan, about whom little is known, had been taking directions from Rashid Rauf, a dual Pakistani-British citizen who was arrested in Pakistan shortly before British police rounded up Khan and 23 other British residents believed to be members of Khan’s cell. Days later, a 25th person was arrested in Britain. Two of those arrested have since been released.

Pakistan authorities now believe that a ranking al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan hatched the plan, said a top Pakistani government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of British requests that he not talk about the case. Afghan officials have denied that the plot came from their country.

Some terrorism experts have expressed caution about whether there is a definite link to al-Qaida.

Rauf, 29, was either responsible for the planning of the attack or acted as the liaison between al-Qaida in Afghanistan and planners in Britain, according to the Pakistani government official.

Rauf’s arrest Aug. 9 in Bahawalpur in eastern Pakistan, a hotbed for Islamic militants, triggered the unraveling of the alleged plot and the arrest of the suspects in Britain, including Rauf’s brother, Tayib.

Rashid Rauf “is certainly a key figure – not a mastermind,” the Pakistani official said.


Pakistani authorities have said the interrogation of Rauf has produced many leads, but it’s not clear where he’s being held or how these interrogations are taking place.

He appeared briefly before a magistrate last weekend and can be held indefinitely in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorist activity.

At some point, Rauf may be sent to Britain for more questioning, but only after the Pakistanis are finished, the Pakistani official said.


Since the arrests began, British police have launched an intense search for evidence, serving 46 search warrants. The BBC reported Friday that 11 locations were still being searched.

Crime technicians in overalls and latex gloves have been picking through the modest homes of the suspects in the working-class northeastern London neighborhood of Walthamstow and suburban High Wycombe, west of the city.

After a closed-door, daylong hearing on Wednesday, a magistrate agreed to let the police hold the suspects for seven more days without filing charges.

Police have removed items from several homes, including computers, bottles and documents. They have also removed computers from Internet cafes. The alleged plotters are thought to have sent messages to each other from the computers.

Police have also spent days combing a woods near High Wycombe. The BBC reported Thursday that police found a suitcase in the woods containing bombmaking supplies. Scotland Yard has declined to discuss the report.


The U.S. intelligence official said some of the evidence that was seized clearly pointed to the manufacture of liquid bombs whose components could be carried onto an airliner and then assembled. The official confirmed that British police had uncovered such “high-grade” evidence as chemicals, diagrams on how to make liquid bombs and components for detonators.

But the U.S. official said no evidence had yet been found that prototype bombs had been built and tested. The official also said British investigators had “misconstrued” ordinary travel by some of the participants as a “trial run.”

The official said there was solid evidence against eight or nine principals in the plot, but that some of those still held might end up being released for lack of evidence.


The extended search period after the arrests suggests that British police were not prepared to move on the suspects when they did, some believe.

A government official told the Chicago Tribune that the arrest of Rashid Rauf came after the United States pushed Pakistan to do so and was made despite British concerns that it might force them to move on the case before they were ready.

“In the U.K., their concern was to discover evidence because it was happening in their country,” the government official said. “But the U.S. approach was to do it immediately in case they tried to blow up a plane.”

Pakistan favored the U.S. approach. “The last thing we would like is anything happens anywhere, and they say, “Oh, it’s Pakistan,”‘ the official said.

The U.S. intelligence official agreed that U.S. authorities were fearful that the airliner plot would be carried out before the British police moved to stop it. The official said there was a series of meetings among the U.S., Britain and Pakistan over how to proceed, and he insisted that there was an ultimate consensus to move when they did.

“There was obviously anxiousness on our side and theirs,” the U.S. official said. “Do we have everybody, there and here, who may be getting on a plane? . . . Sure, the Brits may have wanted to look at it a couple more hours or days to make sure they weren’t missing somebody.”


Neil Gerrard, who represents Walthamstow in Parliament and is receiving regular briefings from the police, said, “Left to their own devices, the police would not have acted as quickly as they did.”

At least 10 of those arrested were living in and around Walthamstow, where the average income is the lowest in the London area and which is home to a large Pakistani and South Asian community that has been shaken and mystified by the arrests.

Like the Sept. 11 plot leaders and the four suicide bombers who died last summer in an attack on the London transportation system, a number of those being held at the high-security Paddington Green jail bear scant resemblance to the alienated, disaffected, ill-educated young men the world had previously come to associate with terrorism.

A search for common threads among the Walthamstow and High Wycombe residents in custody produces nothing that seems to connect them all. They include three sets of brothers, a couple of cousins and several young men who have been friends since childhood.

A half dozen have visited Pakistan, though not at the same time. About that many attended London Metropolitan University, known for its large immigrant student population.

Nine prayed at the Masjid-E-Umer mosque on Queens Road in Walthamstow.

But everyone agrees that mosque, like the dozen or so others around Walthamstow, is far from an enclave of radical Muslim thought.

Three of those arrested were converts to Islam. Nearly all the rest were born into families that immigrated here from Pakistan, in particular from the Mirpur region of Kashmir.

British police and government officials have offered few details of a case they initially billed as an international scheme to commit mass murder. U.S. law-enforcement authorities, initially talkative about the plot, have become equally tight-lipped, explaining that pretrial publicity laws in Britain make it difficult to discuss the matter.


In the meantime, what were initially reported as key elements in the case have been called into question.

Early reports that someone in Pakistan called the British suspects and urged them to quickly carry out the airliner attacks are untrue, Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told the Tribune.

Also untrue, Pakistani officials said, is the allegation that some of the suspects who traveled to Pakistan recently worked with Matiur Rehman, a known al-Qaida explosives specialist who is believed to be in hiding there.

“There’s no connection,” Aslam said.

News reports last week that Rehman was arrested in Pakistan were denied by Pakistani officials.

Also false, Pakistani officials said, are news reports from the U.S. that money moved to the suspects through Pakistan relief charities, including one called Jamaat ul Dawa.

The British Charity Commission announced that it was examining the charities, fueling more speculation. But Christopher Kiggell, the commission’s spokesman, said that the review began only because charity officials read the news stories, not because police asked for a review.

Contrary to published reports, Pakistani officials said that they have not uncovered martyr videos in which several of the suspects purportedly confessed their roles in the plot as part of an extremist Islamic war against the West. But the BBC reported Friday that some martyr tapes were discovered on computers seized in London.

The general feeling in Walthamstow is that those arrested are, in the phrase repeated by virtually everyone, “innocent until proven guilty.”


Many point to recent instances in which the police have overreached.

Two weeks after last year’s attack on the London subways that killed 52 early-morning commuters, London police shot to death a young Brazilian man in a subway station whom they mistook for a suicide bomber.

The police apologized, but there have been other such incidents. The most recent occurred in June, when police stormed an East London home in search of what an informant claimed was a “chemical bomb.” A 23-year-old man was shot and wounded, and he and his 20-year-old brother arrested.

Both men were freed after no bomb was found.

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(John Crewdson and Stephen J. Hedges reported from London and Kim Barker from Islamabad, Pakistan.)

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-08-19-06 1513EDT