PARIS, March 5: French anti-terrorist magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere says he has issued an international arrest warrant against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested Saturday in Pakistan to interrogate him with regard to the April 11, 2002, terrorist attack against a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia. The attack killed 21 people, including two French citizens.

Judge Bruguiere had determined last November, after interrogating Walid Jaouar, a French national and brother of alleged Djerba kamikaze Nizar Naouar, that the order for the April 11 attack came from Karachi, and from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed himself.

The French magistrate is also understood to want to question Khalid Mohammed with regard to the May 8, 2002, terrorist attack in Karachi on a busload of French citizens working under contract with the Pakistani Navy on an Agusta-90B submarine built at the Karachi naval shipyard, an attack that resulted in the deaths of 11 DCN (naval construction directorate) employees.

Judge Bruguiere and other French authorities have always asserted that the two suspects produced until now by Pakistan — Aziz Basheer and Mohammad Bashir — are only “small fish,” to use the judge’s expression, and that the order for the attack came from higher up, probably from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed himself.

The French police said the last call placed by Nizar Naouar before undertaking the Djerba attack was to a number in Karachi that they have been able to identify as belonging to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

They French did not indicate then, nor have they done so recently, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is as highly placed in Al Qaeda hierarchy as US authorities have recently claimed. French anti-terrorist authorities and President Jacques Chirac himself have often been at loggerheads in recent months over the importance being accorded by US authorities, and notably President Bush, to certain personalities on whom the Americans would like to lay the blame not only for the 9/11 attacks, but also more recent attacks in Europe and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, representatives of the families of the 11 victims of the May 8, 2002, terrorist attack in Karachi say they have sent observers to the city for the trial of Aziz Basheer and Mohammad Bashir.

Also, they say, given their inability to obtain any information as to the circumstances in which the 11 DCN employees were killed, they have hired two attorneys to attempt to obtain the information from the directorate.