PARIS, March 4: A French expert on Al Qaeda and an adviser on terrorism to the United Nations who was privy to the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, says that “it’s a major arrest that will lead to many more.”

The expert, Roland Jaccard, who last year published the world’s first biography of Osama bin Laden (In the Name of Ussama Bin Laden), says that he has been in touch with Pakistani authorities over the arrest of Khalid Mohammed and US officials who took part in the arrest.

He notes that “if the arrest will lead to others, it is not because Khalid Mohammed will talk, for I don’t expect for him to voluntarily reveal any new information about Al Qaeda, or about anything else for that matter, but because Pakistani authorities and US officials found in his possession a number of diskettes that are already beginning to ‘talk’ in their own right and providing interrogators with further leads that before long will translate into the arrest of other members of the Al Qaeda hierarchy.”

Already, he says, the diskettes “have given interrogators plans for other attacks in Pakistan, also elsewhere,” although he would not reveal where precisely.