Top al Qaida man nabbed

Mardan, Pakistan

Pakistani officials last week arrested Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan-born militant said to be No. 3 in the al Qaida hierarchy. Al-Libbi was wanted in connection with two assassination attempts on Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Officials hoped that al-Libbi could tell them where Osama bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were hiding. But Pakistan’s intelligence service told the London Sunday Telegraph that despite beatings and injections of sodium pentathol, al-Libbi didn’t talk. Raids on militant hideouts in the North-West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan, also netted Mushtaq Ahmed, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate Musharraf in 2003 but escaped from prison early this year.

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