ISLAMABAD, July 30 (AFP) - The arrest in Pakistan of a key Al-Qaeda suspect in the 1998 east Africa US embassy bombings may hamper the terror network's activities even if it fails to bring Osama bin Laden hunters any closer to their prey, analysts said Friday.
Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was captured July 25 from a house in eastern Pakistan after a fierce eight-hour shootout, Pakistan announced late Thursday. With him were his Uzbek wife, two other women, six children, and four men including a pair of South Africans.
"It certainly is a significant arrest," said Singapore-based Al-Qaeda expert Rohan Gunaratna, adding Ghailani had long been involved in the network's operational planning.
"He is one of the most important leaders of Al-Qaeda involved in operational planning for a long time," Gunaratna, who heads terrorism research at Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies and wrote the book Inside Al-Qaeda - Global Network of Terror, told AFP.
"Al-Qaeda has already weakened but his arrest will further weaken the group.
"Every significant arrest of members of a terrorist group diminishes the capabilities of that terrorist organisation to mount attacks."
Ghailani, aged 30 or 34 according to the FBI's records of different birth dates he uses, had been hiding for about one month in the industrial town of Gujrat, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of the capital Islamabad in the populous Punjab province, Pakistani security officials said.
Since his indictment in New York in December 1998 over the Dar es Salaam US embassy attack, in which 11 people were killed the same day as 213 people died in the Nairobi US embassy bombing, Ghailani had been reported both in Afghanistan and Liberia.
Like three major Al-Qaeda arrests before his, Ghailani was caught not in remote tribal borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan where the bin Laden hunt is focussed, but in one of Pakistan's crowded cities.
Bin Laden's key lieutenant Abu Zubaydah was captured in the nearby industrial Punjab city of Faisalabad in March 2002.
On September 11 of the same year, the first anniversary of the terror attacks on the United States, alleged co-planner of the attacks Ramzi bin Al-Shaibh was arrested in southern commercial hub Karachi.
Al-Qaeda number three and purported chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was caught in a home near military headquarters in bustling Rawalpindi city, next to Islamabad.
However Bin Laden himself remains elusive almost three years after the hijacked planes ploughed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing about 3,000 people.
Western intelligence agencies believe he has been hiding, with his Egyptian doctor and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, along the mountainous 2,500 kilometer Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.
Interrogations of Mohammad, Zubayda and al-Shaibh have not brought hunters any closer to bin Laden, but Gunaratna believed Ghailani may be able to provide some information on the terror chief.
"Certainly any information provided by him will be crucial in the hunt not only for Osama bin Laden but also for the other Al-Qaeda leaders," he said.
However Australia's leading terrorism expert Clive Williams downplayed the significance of Ghailani's capture.
"As I undestand it, Ghailani is probably in the top 80 people within Al-Qaeda... the inner core of Al Qaeda is 80 to 100," Williams, who heads the department of terrorism studies at Canberra's Australian National University, told AFP.
"I think his significance has been overstated to some extent."