LITTLE ROCK, Jan 26: An Al Qaeda operative with close ties to the suspected mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks was captured last week in Iraq, US President George Bush said on Monday.
Mr Bush said the Al Qaeda figure, Hassan Ghul, was helping the network step up attacks against US troops in Iraq. The United States believes Al Qaeda members are have entered Iraq after President Saddam Hussein's ouster.
Mr Bush said Hassan Ghul "reported directly" to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is suspected of coordinating the Sept 11 attacks and who was captured in Pakistan in March. He is now in US custody. "He (Ghul) was moving money and messages around South Asia and the Middle East. He's a part of this network of haters that we're dismantling," the president said during a speech in Little Rock.
"He was captured in Iraq where he was helping Al Qaeda to put pressure on our troops. There's one less enemy we need to worry about with the capture of Hassan Ghul," Mr Bush said. The Bush administration says there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, although Mr Bush has said there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the Sept 11 attacks.
MISSING US SOLDIERS: Hopes were bleak on Monday of recovering alive three US soldiers lost when a boat capsized and a helicopter crashed in northern Iraq, as the country's Shia majority drew up battle plans in their campaign for swift elections.
The helicopter went down Sunday in the Tigris river near the main northern city of Mosul on a rescue mission after the US boat overturned in the afternoon, leaving two Iraqi police and a translator dead.
Search operations were continuing on Monday for the two US pilots and boat crewman. A US military spokesman said rescue teams had briefly come under small-arms fire but there were no casualties. An investigation is under way into the crash, but it is not believed to have been caused by hostile fire.
A senior police official in Mosul said the Kiowa Warrior helicopter had flown at low altitude into towing cables strung across the swollen river, which runs from Turkey to Syria before flowing south across Iraq to the Gulf. Meanwhile, Iraq's majority Shias shifted up a gear in their drive to persuade the US-led coalition to rethink its plans for a transfer of power in June.
As the United Nations mulled sending a mission to the country to assess the feasibility of holding polls before the coalition's June 30 handover deadline, Shia leaders clamouring for elections hunkered down for strategy talks. In a worrying shift for the coalition, some Shia members of the usually compliant interim Governing Council are now siding with Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the election campaign's standard bearer.-AFP/Reuters