KARACHI, Nov 14: A top Al Qaeda terror mastermind has slipped through the hands of Pakistani security agencies, a senior police intelligence official admitted here.

The Al Qaeda’s head of operations, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered the mastermind of the terror attacks in Washington and New York on Sept 11, 2001, eluded police during raids in Karachi that netted eight suspected Al Qaeda militants, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“We have been after him for the past couple of months following intelligence reports about his presence in Karachi,” he said.

The official said both Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al Shibh, another wanted senior Al Qaeda man, had been hiding together with other Al Qaeda fugitives in Karachi since January.

Al Shibh and two other suspected Al Qaeda members were captured in a September 11 raid on an apartment in a plush district of the city, a day after five other suspects were arrested and two shot dead in a separate raid on a different apartment.

Mohammed had been in one of the raided apartments but managed to escape, the official said.

“In one of the two raids Sheikh managed to escape and we have not since been able to track him down. It is possible he may have shifted his operations from Karachi to some other place in Pakistan.”

The New York Times earlier this month quoted Pakistani officials as saying that the Al Qaeda network was trying to establish a new base in crowded Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city with some 14 million inhabitants.

The officials told the newspaper that Mohammed, a suspect also in an April 11 bomb attack on a Tunisian synagogue which killed 21 people, was staying in an apartment in Karachi.

Five of the Al Qaeda suspects were handed over to the United States, joining the more than 422 Al Qaeda suspects already passed to them by Pakistani authorities.

Security agencies recovered two satellite phones, a laptop computer, compact discs and printed material, mostly in Arabic, during the raids.

Pakistan’s military intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence was now working to gather information from the find, he said, adding that it no longer involved police.

“There is no doubt that the presence of Mohammed, Al Shibh and others in Karachi clearly indicates that they have been operating from here for months,” he said.

The official claimed the arrests were a major setback for Al Qaeda’s Karachi operations.

French investigators of the Tunisian bombing have said that the suspect in the suicide attack, Nizar Nawar, was given the go-ahead to carry it out in a phone conversation with a senior Al Qaeda leader based in Pakistan.

Sindh police chief Syed Kamal said French investigators had not contacted them over the case. — AFP