Pak crackdown sends al-Qaeda scattering

Some of them were among the 30 or so suspects rounded up by Pakistani security agencies since mid-July, including a communications expert and a Tanzanian suspect in the 1998 East Africa US embassy bombings.

"Authentic information has revealed these terrorist masterminds were re-locating from the mountainous and tribal regions in the north to other cities and even other countries," General Musharraf told state-run Pakistan Television PTV overnight.

"They are desperate. They are trying to move away. They are perhaps trying to relocate elsewhere in the world."

The assaults on al-Qaeda sanctuaries in February and March in South Waziristan, the remotest of seven tribal districts hugging the porous Afghan border, had sent them scattering.

"Military operations in Wana, Shakai, Santoi and Mantoi villages in South Waziristan have uprooted these terrorists to move away to other cities and countries," he said.

The captures in July of computer whizz Naeem Noor Khan and of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the suspect in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings of US embassies in 1998, yielded a massive trove of information on Osama bin Laden's network.

This in turn led to the uncovering of fresh terror plots in Britain, Pakistan and the US, new terror alerts in US cities and the arrests of 12 al-Qaeda suspects in Britain including major operative Abu Eisa al-Hindi.

Musharraf traced the al-Qaeda planners' presence in Pakistan back to the US-led military campaign to oust Afghanistan's Taliban regime in late 2001.