ISLAMABAD, May 28: Two attempts to kill President Pervez Musharraf last year were masterminded by a militant leader linked to US journalist Daniel Pearl's murder and Al Qaeda's number three, a senior security official told AFP on Friday.

Amjad Farooqi, 30, was the 'very clever' Pakistani mastermind Gen Musharraf referred to in a local television interview on Thursday in which he outlined the involvement of low-ranking army and air force personnel in the first attempt on his life on December 14, the official, who could not be identified, told AFP.

"Investigators have conclusively established that Amjad Farooqi hatched the plot to kill the president, with the prompting and assistance of the Al Qaeda terror network," he said.

"A nationwide hunt is on to arrest the suspect." President Musharraf himself had not identified the man, saying it would compromise a manhunt for the militant who had been close to capture several times.

Farooqi had close contact with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Al Qaeda's number three and the alleged chief planner of 9/11 attacks, before Khalid's March 2003 arrest, the official said.

He was also intricately involved in the elaborate plot to abduct and murder Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl in early 2002, he said. Farooqi is believed to have provided the militants who held Pearl in a shed on Karachi's outskirts after the reporter was abducted on Jan 23, 2002 as he went to what he believed would be an interview with another militant leader.

And he provided a trio of Arab-looking men who turned up on the sixth day of Pearl's captivity and beheaded him on camera, the official said. Farooqi is described as a 'right-hand man' of the militant convicted of plotting Pearl's abduction and murder, British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.

"He gave the gang to Sheikh Omar which executed Daniel Pearl," the security official said. Farooqi has a Rs3 million bounty on his head and has been missing for more than two years.

Gen Musharraf said in the television interview that the Pakistani mastermind was hired by a foreign Al Qaeda operative to execute the Dec 14 and Dec 25 attempts to assassinate him.

"At what level this foreign initiative, whether it comes at the highest level, some orders from the highest level, which I mean Mr (Ayman) Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden, I don't know that.

"But certainly a foreigner is involved, a non-Pakistani," he told the television channel on Thursday. "And then they hire a Pakistani extremist. He gets the money, he gets the support. He then puts up a team to act. So therefore this becomes the operative man and he organizes a team and he gets people, extremists of ours. He inducts them and they then execute the plan," he said.

The security official said that Farooqi had recruited the two suicide bombers, who had both taken part in the guerilla activities against Indian occupation in Kashmir and fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. -AFP