WASHINGTON, March 8: President George W. Bush said on Saturday that the arrest of a key Al Qaeda leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, will help prevent future terror attacks.

In his weekly radio address, Mr Bush said that US forces and their allies had so far “dealt with 3,000 terrorists.” Some of them, he said, had been detained or arrested while some will “otherwise be not a problem for the United States,” a phrases he uses for those killed by security forces.

Mr Bush said the United States was currently working with more than 90 countries in the war against terror and was determined to defeat the terrorists wherever they might be hiding.

On Friday, the White House issued a statement from Mr Bush warning Al Qaeda leaders and operatives that sooner or later they would all be caught.

White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who said that time was no constraint in the hunt for terrorists, said:

The president’s message to all Al Qaeda, whether it’s Osama bin Laden or any of his other lieutenants, is they will be caught whatever time it takes.

In his radio address Saturday, President Bush once again praised “Pakistani authorities” for capturing “the mastermind of the Sept 11th attacks against our country, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”

“This is a landmark achievement in disrupting the al Qaeda network, and we believe it will help us prevent future acts of terror,” he said.