Ghailani ‘tight-lipped’ about Osama

ISLAMABAD: Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Al Qaeda operative and one of the world’s most wanted men with a multi-million-dollar price on his head, is resisting questioning by Pakistani interrogators seeking clues to the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden, officials said on Friday.

Investigators are scouring a computer and several disks seized when they captured Ghailani and 13 others after a 14-hour gunbattle with security forces at the weekend in the city of Gujarat, 175 km southeast of Islamabad, intelligence sources said on Friday. The suspects were being interrogated in Lahore. But Ghailani, born in Zanzibar in Tanzania and wanted by the United States for his role in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people, had given little away, one intelligence source said.

“He is still tight-lipped,” the official said. Ghailani was captured along with his Uzbek wife and two South Africans after his driver led police to his hideout, the intelligence source said. Among those found in the house were three women and five children.

Ghailani had brought two other foreign comrades to his safe house after the group became nervous that security forces were closing in on the hotel in Gujarat where they had been staying, the intelligence source said.

The security forces have also caught his local contact, Ejaz Warraich, a member of Millat-e-Islamia. Warraich rented the safe house for Ghailani. Ghailani, who reportedly could not drive a car at the time of the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, is probably the most senior Al Qaeda operative caught in Pakistan since the arrest in March 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. “It is a big achievement for our security forces,” Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told the National Assembly on Friday. agencies

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