NEW YORK, Sept 15: The capture of Ramzi bin Al-Shaiba reinforces fears among the Western officials here that Al Qaeda is re-establishing its operations in Karachi and other cities with the help of Pakistani militants, New York Times reports.

“They’re here,” a Western diplomats told the paper. “I think there are some high-level people who may be regrouping.”

Even before the arrest of Ramzi, the European officials had warned that Al Qaeda appeared to have shifted much of its operations to Karachi.

A year ago, 90 per cent of communications and other links between the suspected Al Qaeda members in Europe and individuals in Pakistan were traced to Peshawar, a European law enforcement official said. As of this spring, roughly half of the intercepted communications and other links were being traced to Karachi, the paper said.

“Obviously, the brains and money for the terrorists have shifted from Peshawar to Karachi,” a European diplomat told the NYT. A senior Pakistani intelligence official told the paper that Al Qaeda might be trying to re-establish Karachi as a transit point for moving personnel, money and material.

It is believed to have established a network in Karachi with the aid of the Taliban consulate there in the 1990s.

“Its workings have now become slowly obvious,” the official said referring to a possible network, “though we don’t know how much we know and how much we don’t.”

Besides Ramzi, other senior Al Qaeda figures are believed to have been in the city recently.

In June, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be Al Qaeda’s chief of operations, was interviewed in Karachi along with Ramzi by Al Jazeera television network. But he was not captured in the Wednesday raid and remains at large.

Information found in the raids led to the arrest of nine more suspects in middle-class neighbourhoods on Friday, a Pakistan investigator said. Western officials believe that Al Qaeda helped the Pakistani militants in carrying out two car bombings there this year.

Eleven French engineers had died in May in one of the attack while 12 Pakistanis had been killed in the other at the American Consulate a month later, the paper says.

A senior police official in Karachi told the paper on Thursday that one of his subordinates wanted to investigate whether any of the men arrested on Wednesday had a role in the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi. The Pakistanis who were arrested in that case stated that Mr Pearl had been killed by two Yemenis. Eight Yemenis were arrested in the raid.

Senior Pakistani officials play down the threat. They say that only small groups of Al Qaeda members remain in the country. But they concede that the techniques used by Mr Ramzi to hide here show how difficult it can be to find them.

“They merge with the local population, and they don’t interact very much,” Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema, a senior interior ministry official, told the paper in Islamabad. “They are very difficult to recognize”, he added.

The account of Ramzi’s arrest presented by the Pakistani officials in the last several days differs markedly from the one outlined by the US officials in Washington. Mr Cheema said the US agents and information had played no role in the arrest.

Members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network who fled Afghanistan have regrouped throughout the Middle East, particularly in Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, citing Arab intelligence sources, AFP adds.

Key Al Qaeda members have gone to Syria and to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, sources told the daily.

Citing Arab intelligence reports, the Times reported that Syria, which control’s Lebanon’s political life, has allowed dozens of Al Qaeda operatives to take up residence in Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, Ein el Hilwa, near the southern city of Sidon.

Lebanon has denied that any Al Qaeda members reside there, but the camp is controlled by Palestinians of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, not the Lebanese government, according to the newspaper.

Arab intelligence sources said Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also are actively supporting the organization, providing everything from safe houses to phony travel documents.

The terror group also has finetuned its operations, improving its methods for using the Internet without its communications being detected and, simplifying the means of sending cash to operatives, according to the Times.—AFP