Pakistan has said it will only consider extraditing a senior al-Qaeda suspect after its own interrogation of the man is complete, while top government officials said his arrest shows Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network is crumbling.
A top Pakistani security official told reporters on Friday that the information that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was providing to his interrogators has already been shared with American intelligence, and that experts had begun to scour computer hard drives and diskettes found during his arrest.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat said the arrest was a "great blow to the al-Qaeda" network of Osama bin Laden, but refused to say whether Ghailani had any knowledge of the terror leader's whereabouts.
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the rugged mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, though there is no hard evidence of his location.
"Pakistan is determined to flush out terrorists from its soil and dismantle their network definitively," Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said, in reference to al-Qaeda.
"The latest arrests indicate that the network is crumbling down," he said.
Ghailani, one of the FBI's 22 most wanted terrorists and a man with a US$25 million bounty on his head, has been indicted in the Southern District of New York for his alleged role in the 1998 twin US embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. He could face the death penalty.
Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Rauf Chaudhry said his government had not yet received any request from Washington for Ghailani's extradition.
He said Pakistan would consider extradition: "But, first we would like to interrogate him thoroughly to check his links with other people in Pakistan."
Meanwhile, Tanzanian police spokesman Ernest Saria said his country had not yet decided whether to seek custody of Ghailani or clear his extradition to America.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS