Meanwhile, CIA agents are interrogating Walid bin Attash, an al-Qaida operative allegedly involved in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Attash was also arrested in Karachi on Tuesday along with five other suspects.
Pakistani officials told United Press International that the suspects were linked to an al-Qaida ring, which sheltered al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives fleeing neighboring Afghanistan. During interrogation they found that one of them was Attash, a Yemeni national believed to be involved in the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in October 2000. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed in the attack.
Walid bin Attash also allegedly uses two other first names, Khalid and Tawfiq.
The suspects arrested with Attash told their interrogators that they were low-level operators whose main job was to receive Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives and take them to various hideouts in Karachi.
They also identified several such places in the city. A Pakistani intelligence team raided two such houses in central and eastern districts of Karachi. From one of these houses, they arrested three more suspects while the other was empty, police said.
Police are refusing to disclose the names of other suspects because, they said, they were still trying to confirm if the suspects had given their real names.
Pakistani authorities also have sent teams to the Balochistan province, which borders Afghanistan and is used by the fleeing al-Qaida men to enter Pakistan, officials said.
The head of the anti-terrorism cell at Pakistan's Interior Ministry told UPI in Islamabad that the CIA is also helping Pakistani intelligence agencies but is not directly involved in the raids.
He said Attash was still in Pakistan's custody but indicated that Islamabad would positively consider any U.S. request to hand him over to American authorities.
Karachi, a sprawling city of more than 12 million people, has become a hub for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who fled the neighboring state of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. The United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Al-Qaida terrorists were held responsible for that attack, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence sources told UPI in Washington that Attash was only a midlevel operative, not a major al-Qaida leader as some media reports are saying.
But they said that he did participate in the Cole bombing and also helped set up al-Qaida networks in Tanzania, and that these networks were of "paramount importance."
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
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