ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan claimed it had dealt Al-Qaeda a crushing blow after killing a top militant said to have masterminded attempts on President Pervez Musharraf's life and arranged the beheading of US reporter Daniel Pearl.
Amjad Farooqi had also helped hide the alleged chief plotter of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and was closely associated with Al-Qaeda's new operations chief, Libyan Abu Faraj Farj, security officials said.
Farooqi, Pakistan's most wanted militant, was shot dead during a two-hour gunbattle at his rural hideout north of Karachi on Sunday morning, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said.
"Farooqi's elimination is a crushing blow to the Al-Qaeda network in Pakistan because he was the man who had been providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with the manpower to carry out attacks," a senior security official told AFP.
Farooqi, 30, was one of four men who kidnapped Pearl in Karachi in January 2002 and allegedly recruited the trio who slit his throat around a week later, according to investigators. He had been indicted over Pearl's murder.
Musharraf named Farooqi as the mastermind of attempts to kill him last December but the militant had evaded a massive nationwide manhunt for nine months.
A mobile phone call intercepted by intelligence agencies led them to his new hideout in the town of Nawabshah, 270 kilometers (169 miles) north of Karachi, said Karachi's chief police investigator Fayyaz Leghari.
Paramilitary police surrounding his hideout were met with a hail of automatic gunfire from Farooqi and his accomplices.
In the ensuing firefight Farooqi cried out "I prefer death!" according to a security official involved in the raid.
Three other "very important wanted terrorists" were captured during the raid and Monday were being questioned in Karachi.
"The three accomplices of Farooqi are being interrogated by intelligence agencies and it may lead to some more arrests," Sindh province home minister Rauf Siddiqi told AFP.
"We are quite hopeful that some of their other accomplices might be hiding in Nawabshah or in nearby areas and will be caught."
Farooqi's body has been transported to Karachi and DNA samples were being sent to eastern city Lahore to confirm his identity, Siddiqi said.
"Farooqi's death and the arrest of his teammates is a setback for the militants," he added.
Farooqi had undergone training in Afghanistan in 1992 with the Pakistani militant organisation Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami.
He had fought alongside the hardline Taliban militia and developed close contacts with Osama bin Laden and top Al-Qaeda leaders in the late 1990s when the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan and sheltered the terror network there.
Leghari said Farooqi had helped hide Khalid Sheikh Mohammad -- Al-Qaeda's number three and the alleged chief planner of the September 11, 2001 attacks -- in Karachi before Mohammad was arrested near Islamabad in March last year.
He was said to be "very close" to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born militant convicted of plotting Pearl's abduction and murder.
Musharraf, who threw his support behind the US "war on terror" after the September 11 attacks, said this month he was making significant inroads into breaking the Al-Qaeda network -- including the arrest of some 600 suspects.