Date:30/04/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/04/30/stories/2007043004901400.htm

International

Iran helped nab Al-Qaeda leader?

Jason Burke

Paris: British diplomats are checking secret reports that elements within Iran, normally hostile to the West, helped the American secret services to capture Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Kurdish-born senior Al-Qaeda militant who was revealed last week to have been arrested on the border between Iran and Iraq late last year.

Abdul Hadi (45), a former Iraqi army officer who speaks five languages and is a key link between the Al-Qaeda leadership in western Pakistan and militants in Iraq, had "met with Al-Qaeda leaders in Iran" and had urged them to support efforts in Iraq and to cause "problems within Iran", U.S. military sources told The Observer.

Elements within the complex matrix of interest groups that make up the Iranian regime, who have co-operated with Western intelligence services before when it has served their purposes, provided crucial elements of information, possibly through intermediaries, allowing Abdul Hadi to be captured. "They may have felt he posed an equal threat to them," said one Paris-based West Asian diplomat. "One of Tehran's biggest fears is of an alliance between Kurdish ethnic separatists in the northwest and Al-Qaeda."

Any such help would have been highly secret, given the tense relations between the Iranian regime and Western nations which came to a head with last month's detention of British naval personnel, allegations that Tehran is supporting Shia militants in Iraq and fierce recriminations over Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear technology.

However, senior U.S. intelligence officials said the Iranian government had "in some cases" been helpful in tracking and "disabling" key militants crossing their national territory between Iraq and Afghanistan. The key Egyptian militant Saif al-Adel, once in charge of training Al-Qaeda's new recruits, and one of Osama bin Laden's sons are both believed to be under some kind of detention in Iran. Pentagon officials said Hadi had been attempting to return to Iraq "to manage Al-Qaeda affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets". —