WASHINGTON, March 15: US officials and terrorism experts have rejected the claim of an FBI informant that Al Qaeda’s No. 2 was frequently seen in a California mosque in 1998 and 1999.

“This is pretty far-fetched,” Rand Corp. terrorism specialist Brian Jenkins told the Los Angeles Times.

Security consultant Daniel Coleman, former FBI case agent for Osama Bin Laden, said that “by 1998, Ayman Al-Zawahri was in Afghanistan and never returned to the US. He was on TV in Afghanistan in 1998”.

Several US counter-terrorism officials in Washington also dismissed the assertion that Zawahri was seen in a California mosque between 1998 and 1999.

In the years immediately after the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Zawahri is known to have visited the US on several occasions.

But US officials, including one who has long tracked Zawahri, told the newspaper they were virtually certain that the Egyptian had not entered the United States after 1995.

Naseem Khan, an FBI informant, told a California court earlier this week Zawahri spent time in Lodi, a farming town in California, which is home to an estimated 2,500 Muslims of Pakistani origin.

The Pakistani community of farm workers, welders and truck drivers, many of whom have lived in Lodi for generations, reacted to the reports with a mixture of outrage and disbelief.

“What would he be doing here? We are Pakistani,” shop-owner Mohammed Shoaib told the Times.