SAN FRANCISCO, June 17: Hundreds of Al Qaeda terrorist operatives are hiding in Pakistan’s cities after forming or renewing alliances with local Muslim extremist networks that have helped provide safe houses for communications, training and logistics, Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.

The result is that America’s closest ally in Central Asia (Pakistan) has in effect replaced Afghanistan as a command-and- control centre for at least some of the battered remnants of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist army, the paper said.

“They don’t operate with impunity there like they did in Afghanistan but they have lots of supporters, and it’s easy for them to blend in,” a US intelligence official was quoted as saying.

US authorities say that Al Qaeda has made similar efforts to regroup by merging with local Muslim extremist groups in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. These makeshift alliances are more decentralized than the network long directed by Osama bin Laden, officials say, and thus may be more difficult for outsiders to penetrate.

According to the paper, since last fall, the United States and its allies have foiled more than a dozen terrorist plots around the world and arrested more than 2,400 suspects in nearly 90 countries.

But more than half of Al Qaeda’s known leaders remain at large, including several linked to the Sept 11 assaults and other major attacks. Officials are especially eager to catch Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an Al Qaeda operative linked to almost every attack against the US since the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the paper said.

The US paper pointed out that the US intelligence analysts still believe that Osama and his top aides have found refuge somewhere along Pakistan’s long and lawless border with Afghanistan. Broad pockets of local sympathizers are said to exist in the semiautonomous tribal areas of Balochistan and North-West Frontier Province.

But US and Pakistani officials now estimate that hundreds more Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who fled the war in Afghanistan have fled to Pakistan. Many are thought to have linked up with like-minded local groups opposed to secular Muslim regimes and to the Western powers that support them, the Los Angeles Times concluded.