Pakistan Tip Led To British Al- Qaeda Arrest: Intelligence Official

ISLAMABAD, Aug 4 (AFP) - A tip-off from Pakistani investigators led to Britain's arrest of a senior Al-Qaeda operative, a Pakistani intelligence officer said Wednesday.
"It has led to the arrest of a senior Al-Qaeda man in Britain," the intelligence officer told AFP, requesting anonymity.
The official identified the man as Abu Eisa Al Hindi, calling the arrest an important blow to the terror network.
"He was planning some sort of an attack in the UK, and his capture is a good signal that intelligence obtained from Al-Qaeda operatives here is producing results," the official said.
He could not say whether he was among the 13 arrests announced by London police for "alleged international terrorism".
Interrogations of, and computer records found on, two key Al-Qaeda suspects arrested in July in Pakistan yielded information which Pakistani authorities passed on to their counterparts in London, he said.
The suspects were Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, indicted over the 1998 US embassy bombing in east Africa, and Pakistani computer mastermind Naeem Noor Khan. Both were caught in eastern Pakistan's Punjab province.
"The computers and CDs we recovered from Khan gave us a deep insight into the planning and working of Al-Qaeda," the officer said.
"The information gleaned from him and Ghailani and from the computers has been passed on to the United States and Britain."
Khan initially refused to cooperate with interrogators. After several hours he began revealing information slowly, the officer said.
Khan's computer records were only recovered a week after his July 12 arrest in Pakistan's easternmost city of Lahore.
"We did not find anything important from his house but a week later we got hold of his computer and CDs, containing information of extremely significant value, from a separate place," the officer said.
"That information is revealing a lot on the whereabouts of "hardcore operational cadre of Al-Qaeda's set-up in Pakistan and many other important countries".
Khan, 25, described as composed and softly-spoken, was from an affluent family, had studied computer science in southern commercial hub of Karachi and spent time living in London.
Senior US government and intelligence officials told The New York Times that computer files sent from Pakistan were discreet documents, each at least 20 pages long and devoted to a particular target.
They said the most intriguing detail was that they were written in "perfect English", leading to the conclusion that its author was "obviously someone who has lived an extensive period of time in the West, exceptionally professional, exceptionally meticulous".
But they did not identify from which suspect the computer files had come.
Pakistan says it has arrested 18 Al-Qaeda suspects in the past three weeks, including two South African operatives and a Nigerian man carrying coded messages on computer disks, as well as Khan and Ghailani.