FAISALABAD recently caught world attention with the arrest of top Al-Qaeda members, including their chief Abu Zubaidah. The city is still attracting the Western media members who are roaming around the places where the FBI and Pakistani law-enforcement agencies had jointly conducted an operation last Thursday.

The strategy of keeping the operation low key by hiding the whereabouts and details of the arrested Al-Qaeda members has succeeded. Their names could not be ascertained by any of the mediamen despite hectic efforts.

Incidentally, when the new tenants moved in the big house off Canal Road late February, word spread that they were Arab traders in the import-export business, supplying shirts and sheets to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It was a credible cover in an industrial city dominated by textile factories.

For the first time, American agents directly took part in the raids conducted by special teams at six different places in the city last Thursday to arrest the “most wanted terrorists” of the world. Separate raids were conducted on various houses by joint teams of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the assistance of sensitive agencies and the Elite Force in which over two dozen alleged Al-Qaeda members were rounded up. A shootout also occurred during a raid in Faisal Town in which a top leader of Al-Qaeda, Abul Hasnat, was gunned down.

The raiding team arrested Abu Zubaidah, claimed to be the mastermind of the New York incident. Two other “terrorists” also sustained injuries but they were rounded up with other accomplices claimed to be of Arab origin. Two constables — Mubashar Husain and Muhammad Jawed — of the Elite Force also sustained injuries when the alleged Al-Qaeda members put up resistance.

An interesting revelation made during the operation was that the hideout of the alleged suspects of Al-Qaeda was believed to have been detected by a special cell of the American FBI and CIA whose personnel were monitoring and deciphering round-the-clock all e-mail messages from the gadgets, scanning the air and satellite signals.

This cell reportedly got the clue of an e-mail