Suicide bombings in Iraq and Pakistan killed dozens of people and wounded Pakistan's interior minister yesterday in an apparent effort to show the al-Qa'ida network remained strong, despite the capture of one of its top figures.
The US revealed on Friday that Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, 46, who is suspected of plotting the 7/7 bombings and other terror attacks in Britain, was captured several months ago while attempting to return to his native Iraq, and is now being held at Guantanamo Bay. Other suspects held there are said to have named him as al-Qa'ida's third most senior figure, after Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
It is believed that Hadi sought to go to Iraq from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder and leader of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, was killed last June in a US air strike. A former Iraqi army officer under Saddam Hussein who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation, Hadi acted as a go-between when Zarqawi asked for Bin Laden's blessing on his movement.
Hadi is accused by Britain of a central role in planning the July 2005 bombings in London. According to a quarterly threat assessment by Britain's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, he was devising another attack, before Tony Blair stood down this summer. He is said to have told an intermediary that it should be "successful and on a large scale".
From his base in Pakistan's tribal territories, Hadi is also said to have masterminded an attempt to assassinate the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf. But despite the fact that he is understood to have undergone lengthy interrogation in a CIA "black prison" before being transferred to Guantanamo, the violence in Iraq and Pakistan has not diminished.
Yesterday a suicide bomber was reported to have killed around 15 people in north-western Pakistan and wounded several others, including the country's interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao. In Iraq, a car exploded near one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines in Karbala, killing at least 30 people, according to initial reports.