PESHAWAR, April 3: Officials say they are certain that a top Al Qaeda lieutenant arrested last week was Osama bin Laden’s bagman, Abu Zubaydah.

“We are conducting DNA test and matching his identity with photos from his past files to re-confirm that we have the right man,” a senior official told Dawn.

“We are certain that we have captured Osama’s bagman,” another official commented. He said that DNA test would further confirm the identity of Zainul Abideen M. Hussain Abu Zubaydah. Intelligence officials in Peshawar have also provided investigators with Abu Zubaydah’s photo from files maintained on him.

Officials describe the 31-year-old bespectacled Palestinian as a ‘facilitator’ who ran the so-called midway houses in Peshawar, initially for Maktabal Khidamat of the late firebrand Palestinian guerrilla leader, Dr Abdullah Azzam, and later for Osama bin Laden.

Investigations carried out by Dawn reveal that it is from one of those midway houses in the Secondary Board area that were used as transit places by radicals to go in and out of Afghanistan that Peshawar’s Criminal Investiation Department first picked up Abu Zubaydah in April 1994. Investigators had recovered several copies of passports of different countries and $12,000 cash. Abu Zubaydah was charged under the 14 Foreigners Act but was subsequently bailed out following which he fled to Afghanistan.

Officials who had interrogated Abu Zubaydah say he told them that he was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 1971 from Palestinian parents from Gaza. Abu Zubaydah had Egyptian travel documents. He had first come to Pakistan in 1987-88 to join other radicals in Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 1990, he went to India where he received computer training in Pune. He returned to Peshawar in 1992. Pretending to be a pro-West fleeing radicals, Abu Zubaydah applied to the UNHCR in Peshawar for a refugee status in 1994 and was subsequently declared as a ‘displaced person’.

Official record reveals that he began trading in honey in Hayatabad in Peshawar to cover his activities but went underground in 1997 when the authorities raided his midway houses. He resurfaced in 1999. Investigators say that Abu Zubaydah was never a combat man. “He was a facilitator and a recruiter who would screen people for training and future assignment,” says one investigator.