After being secretly held by the CIA for months, an Iraqi who was among al-Qaeda's most senior and experienced operatives has been transported to the Guantanamo Bay military prison for terror suspects, officials said on Friday.
Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi is believed responsible for plotting cross-border attacks from Pakistan on US forces in Afghanistan and led an effort to assassinate Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf and UN officials, the Pentagon said.
The transfer of al-Iraqi, said to have been an associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, makes him the 15th so called "high-value" detainee known to have been handed over to military officials at the US Navy facility in Cuba from CIA control.
The arrangement continues to be controversial. People in the secret prisons are subject to harsh interrogation methods that human rights groups say amount to torture. US President George W. Bush's administration says the methods are legal and the interrogation necessary to protect the US from attack.
The Pentagon said al-Iraqi was born in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 1961 and served in Iraq's military. Spokesman Bryan Whitman said he was a major al-Qaeda paramilitary leader in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and in 2002 to 2004 led efforts to attack US forces in Afghanistan with guerrilla forces based in Pakistan.
Neither Whitman nor CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano would say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom.
A US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the Iraqi man had been captured late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country.
CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote in a note to agency employees on Friday that the capture was a significant victory, and the CIA played a crucial role in efforts to locate al-Iraqi, an agency official who saw the note said.
In Pakistan, Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao described the arrest of al-Iraqi as a welcome development but gave no indication that Pakistan played a role.
CIA spokesman Gimigliano called al-Iraqi "a veteran jihadist" and said the capture was good news.
He said of al-Qaeda and the capture: "It is still an extremely dangerous group. But it is evidence of success in terms of eroding their leadership."
It was not until last September that Bush acknowledged the CIA use of secret prisons around the world.
Officials said on Friday that al-Iraqi was captured well after that, but John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York said he was skeptical.
After Bush's announcement, Sifton said: "We thought there were others who remained in CIA custody or, if they weren't, they were temporarily being held in some sort of proxy custody by someone else."
His group says it has a list of 16 additional people who had been in CIA custody at some time and have not been accounted for.
The CIA has not commented on the list.
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