LONDON, Jan 12: Investigators believe that they have identified the man picked by Osama bin Laden to carry out future attacks on the West.

The Times on Friday reported that “Abu Zubeida, who was the group’s director of external affairs, trained most of Al Qaeda’s surviving terrorists and, now that several key figures have been killed in the US-led bombing raids, he has been entrusted with keeping the network going”.

The report says after thousands of hours of questioning Al Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan, Europe and the US, intelligence chiefs have identified Zubeida as the chief strategist behind the group’s most notorious terrorist strikes.

“Using one of his many disguises, Zubeida is thought to have slipped away from his hideout weeks ago, taking with him the secret of where Al Qaeda is hiding its surviving terrorists.”

The paper says, “while others in Al Qaeda’s high command never risked leaving their adopted base in Afghanistan, the elusive figure of Zubeida would use his various fake identities to travel abroad, including making a trip to Europe last year.

The report says that what makes this manhunt so difficult is that Zubeida uses more than 40 aliases and has documents to match each bogus identity.

“Biographical details about him are vague. He is reported to be in his mid-thirties and is described as a tall, sullen figure. Nobody is even sure where he came from, with Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the Gaza Strip variously given as his birthplace. There are no recent photographs of him and, surprisingly, his name does not appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”