BANGKOK, Aug 16: Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Saturday that alleged terrorist mastermind Hambali, who was arrested in Thailand this week, had been planning some kind of action while in the country.

“We arrested two or three suspects before we managed to arrest Hambali... Intelligence gathering clearly showed that they were planning to do something which I do not want to elaborate on,” Thaksin said in a weekly radio address.

Washington announced on Thursday that Hambali, Asia’s most wanted man and the alleged architect of last October’s Bali bombings, had been captured and was in US custody.

Mr Thaksin said Hambali was undergoing interrogation by allied countries in a secret location, while other officials confirmed he had been arrested on Monday in the central city of Ayutthaya.

But the premier declined to confirm reports that Hambali had been planning an attack to disrupt October’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok, which would bring together 21 leaders, including US President George Bush.

“Originally I didn’t want to speak in any detail because the interrogation is still going on and I want the results of the interrogation to lead to more arrests,” he said, after denying on Friday that an action was being planned.

The Nation newspaper reported that Hambali was arrested with explosives and weapons to be used in an attack during the APEC summit. Thai police have already arrested four Thai Muslims over an alleged APEC bomb plot.

A US official in Washington alleged on Friday that Mr Hambali earlier this year had received a “large sum of money for a major attack” from an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan.

The official would not say whether that attack was thwarted or still in the planning stages, but he said Hambali would be interrogated as “part of ongoing efforts to neutralize the threat”.

Mr Thaksin also said authorities had been alerted to money transfers by Hambali during his stay in Thailand, but they were unable to investigate in detail due to a lack of legislation.

“We detected irregularities to do with money transferrals but we could not do anything as we lacked the laws to tackle them,” he said.

The premier said tough anti-terror legislation passed suddenly on Monday by executive decree was not connected to Hambali’s arrest.

The terror chief’s current location is being kept a closely guarded secret.

Thai Defence Minister Thamarak Issarangkun Na Ayutthaya said on Friday that Hambali and his wife were extradited to Indonesia on Wednesday in an operation conducted “with the cooperation of many countries”.

But Indonesian Police chief General Dai Bachtiar insisted Hambali was still “in another country” and had not yet been returned to Indonesia, where he is wanted for a string of attacks, including the Bali blasts which killed 202 people.

Hambali, a top leader of regional network Jemaah Islamiyah, is also wanted in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. —AFP