ISLAMABAD, Aug 13 (AFP) - Two top Arab Al-Qaeda masterminds are still on the run in Pakistan, intelligence officials said Friday, despite a wave of high-profile arrests of key operatives plotting fresh terror strikes.
Libyan Abu Fajr and Egyptian Hamza Rabia each have a five million dollar bounty on their heads and are on a CIA list of the 10 most wanted terror suspects, according to a senior Pakistani security official.
"Libyan Abu Fajr and Egyptian Hamza are still on the run and we are looking for them frantically," a senior intelligence official, who is closely involved in the Al-Qaeda hunt, told AFP.
Fajr is the Libyan Al-Qaeda operative referred to by President Pervez Musharraf as the mastermind of two assassination attempts against him last December, the official said.
"Fajr heads Al-Qaeda's clandestine operational apparatus in Pakistan and also controls Al-Qaeda's sleeper cells in other countries to plot terror strikes," the official said.
Valuable information obtained from some key Al-Qaeda operatives already arrested has given Pakistani security agencies confidence they are closing in on the fugitives.
"We are very hopeful we will be able to capture the two masterminds," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
Another significant dent in the terror network was made when security agencies seized three key Al-Qaeda operatives -- Turkish Yilmaz Mehmat alias Khalid, Pakistani Siddique Shah, alias Mohsin, who is described as an important character linked to Musharraf's assassination bids, and Uzbek national Mansoor.
They are the latest in a gallery of suspected top operatives of Osama bin Laden's terror network caught in the world's second most populous Muslim nation since mid-July.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told AFP security forces have taken into custody some two dozen Al-Qaeda operatives since July.
"The noose is being tightened around the network," Hayat said.
Last month's captures of Tanzanian terror suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, indicted by the US over the 1998 east Africa US embassy bombings, and Pakistani computer whizz Naeem Noor Khan led to the uncovering of a worldwide Al-Qaeda wing plotting fresh terror strikes in Britain, the US and Pakistan.
Interrogations of the pair and examination of their email records and computer files also led to the arrests of top Al-Qaeda suspects in Britain including alleged kingpin Abu Eisa al Hindi also known as Mohammad Bilal.
Attacks were planned to disrupt US November presidential elections, according to interrogators' accounts of Khan and Ghailani's revelations.
Khan's computer contained detailed surveillance records of key financial institutions in Newark, New York and Washington, triggering terror alerts in the three cities.
Mohsin, captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Monday was "one of the important characters in the Musharraf case," the official said. Uzbek Mansoor was arrested in northwest Peshawar city also on Monday.
Mansoor had been hiding in the northwest tribal belt along the Afghan border until Pakistani army assaults sent him fleeing, the official told AFP Thursday.
"He is... one of the persons active in organising and providing the Uzbek people for fighting against the army in Wana and also for acts of terrorism," he added.
Wana, the main city of South Waziristan tribal district, was the scene of intensive assaults by the Pakistani army earlier this year against Al-Qaeda hideouts.
"Mansoor had arranged the marriage of Ghailani with an Uzbek woman," the security official said, without indicating when and where the wedding took place.