PARIS, March 12: Guillaume Dasquie, a French authority on Al Qaeda, says that a story floated last weekend by the US government with regard to who was awarded the 25 million dollars bounty offered for the capture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was a “front story” designed to protect the true recipients of the reward, which apparently was upped, for unspecified reasons, to $27 million.

Mr Dasquie said on Monday night on French public TV channel France 2 that the bounty paid by the US for the capture of Sheikh Mohammed went “directly or indirectly” to the Pakistani secret services (ISI).

The French expert claimed that “evidently the United States was obliged to come up with their story about the money going to an unidentified Egyptian, to cover up the true identity of the recipients, who are according to my sources Pakistanis, who are either part of the Pakistani secret services, which played a central part in the arrest of Mohammed, or have close links with them.”