Pakistanis track down al-Qaida fugitives

By B.K. Bangash

Associated Press

ALIZAI, Pakistan – An al-Qaida war prisoner was shot dead today by Pakistani troops and about a dozen others were recaptured a day after they overpowered guards on a bus and escaped into rocky mountain ravines near the Afghan border.

A paramilitary soldier also died, bringing the death toll related to Wednesday’s escape by al-Qaida fighters to at least 16.

As night fell, seven al-Qaida fighters were missing. Authorities believed they were surrounded in a cave and had four Kalashnikov rifles, little ammunition and no food.

Authorities erected roadblocks every six miles, stopping and searching each vehicle. Only residents, recognized by their tribal affiliation and dialect, were allowed near Parachinar, where the escape began Wednesday.

“The search is going on,” Sabir Ahmed, a local government official, said at one checkpoint.

In the capital of Islamabad, Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan said five Arabs were still missing from the escape, but officials in the area of the search said seven men were on the run. The local officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

The government said the captured fighters commandeered a bus, one of a convoy transferring more than 150 detainees – many from Yemen – to a prison in the town of Kohar. But the prisoner who took the wheel lost control and overturned the vehicle.

Seven Arabs died in the initial struggle, and all six guards were killed, a government spokesman said. A Pakistani news agency, the Afghan Islamic Press, reported three more Arabs died later of their wounds, but other local sources said only one died during the night.

One Arab and a sergeant of a local paramilitary force were killed in an exchange of fire in the morning.

Some of the dead were buried today in the village of Bugzai, said Faiz Mohammed, a shopkeeper reached by telephone.

The area, the domain of Pashtun tribesmen who always have been outside Pakistani government authority, bristled with military vehicles as the hunt intensified today.

Trucks mounted with machine guns patrolled the roads and barren hills along the border, blocking al-Qaida fighters from coming from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

The prisoners who revolted were among 156 captured this week. They were driven out of cave hide-outs in the Tora Bora region after weeks of U.S. bombing and ground attacks by tribal Afghan fighters.

Tora Bora was one of the last pockets of al-Qaida resistance in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led bombing campaign helped opposition fighters drive the Taliban from power. The United States targeted Afghanistan for sheltering Osama bin Laden, chief of al-Qaida.

U.S. authorities, including FBI and CIA agents, are in Pakistan to probe the organization believed responsible for terrorist assaults on the United States.

Interrogations of the scores of bin Laden loyalists captured in Pakistan should yield a “treasure trove” of leads for the U.S. campaign to hunt down the terrorist leader and eradicate his al-Qaida network, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington.

He said U.S. forces are helping anti-Taliban Afghans clear caves “one by one” in the Tora Bora area.

A group of U.S. Special Forces soldiers was seen in the area sifting through documents and other materials apparently brought out from the caves.

Pakistan has granted U.S. interrogators access to al-Qaida members. At least 25 were questioned by a joint U.S.-Pakistan interrogation team, said Interior Ministry officials.

Eleven weeks after the U.S.-led coalition launched military action in Afghanistan, there was no trace of bin Laden, whom unconfirmed reports had earlier placed around Tora Bora.