KARACHI, Pakistan, Sept. 14 -- Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged coordinator of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, was found alone and asleep in an apartment here and taken into custody without a struggle hours before a shootout with other al Qaeda suspects at another location in the city, senior Pakistani intelligence officers said today.
Pakistani officials said Binalshibh, 30, was captured in the first of three raids conducted Tuesday night and Wednesday morning that led to the arrest of eight suspected al Qaeda fugitives and the death of two others.
In the chaos of the rolling raids, the second of which erupted into a three-hour gun battle, officials said that Binalshibh, the former roommate of hijacker Mohamed Atta and the subject of an international manhunt, was not identified until after all the suspects were in custody Wednesday evening and U.S. investigators were able to tell their Pakistani counterparts whom they had pulled in.
"Ramzi was arrested in one of the three raids conducted in quick succession, but he was not netted in the raid that involved the gun battle," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official who added that Binalshibh was "conclusively" identified by U.S. officials once the crackdown was complete.
He and the other suspects were taken to a secret military facility near Karachi's airport, according to a senior Pakistani official who said Binalshibh was to be flown in U.S. custody to an undisclosed location tonight.
Authorities have not yet identified the two dead men, one a Pakistani and one an Arab, leading to intense speculation here that one of them may have been an even more important figure than Binalshibh.
Pakistani police officers at the scene insisted that one of the people killed in the firefight was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Pakistani national born in Kuwait, who has been described as the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Pakistani intelligence officers, however, said they have no indication that the dead Pakistani, who offered fierce resistance before his death, is Mohammed. U.S. officials also said they did not believe that the dead man was Mohammed.
Both U.S. and Pakistani officials said they believed that Mohammed, if alive, was still in Karachi.
Mohammed and Binalshibh gave an interview in June to the al-Jazeera television network in which Binalshibh referred to himself as coordinator of the hijackings and described the elation of al Qaeda members who watched the destruction of the World Trade Center on television. The interview, which was broadcast this week, took place in Karachi, according to the al-Jazeera reporter. Pakistani officials said today they identified the second apartment they raided as the site of the interview and that both men have been living in Karachi, a port city of 10 million that has long attracted Islamic militants from Pakistan and beyond.
Police said the Pakistani man who was killed clearly did not want to be taken alive.
"The Pakistani was such a motivated extremist that he inscribed Allahu Akbar [God is great] with his blood on the wall before he died of bullet wounds to the chest and the neck," according to one police officer who entered the blood-soaked apartment after the raid.
The raids began on Tuesday shortly before midnight when Pakistani police and military officers, following a tip from U.S. intelligence personnel, raided an apartment in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Pechs. They arrested an Arab man without incident and transferred him to a detention center.
The man in handcuffs was Binalshibh, but Pakistani officials said today that at the time of the arrest, they did not know it.
Germany has issued an international warrant for Binalshibh, and German Interior Minister Otto Schily said today that he wanted the suspect extradited to Germany to face trial. Pakistani officials said today that a high-level decision has already been made to hand Binalshibh over to the United States and not Germany.
"The Americans can sort the matter out with the Germans," said a senior Pakistani official.
The United States can now indict him or bring him before a military tribunal, but it is unlikely that he will be handed over to the Germans. Germany has refused to provide evidence for the trial of another Sept. 11 suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, unless it receives guarantees that the evidence would not be used to secure the death penalty.
If Binalshibh were transferred to German custody, the same issue would arise if the United States later sought his extradition or sought to use evidence he could provide for the prosecution of other capital cases, including Moussaoui's.
The German government today played down the possibility of any kind of dispute, and privately German officials have said they would not object if the United States simply went ahead with its own proceedings.
"There is no question we want to bring him before a German court, and we will have to check the procedure," German Justice Minister Herta Daebler-Gmelin said today at a European Union meeting in Copenhagen, which was attended by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. "We are very happy that they got him, and we will speak with others who want to have him. There is no reason for a dispute about this."
Pakistani police said that while U.S. agents identified at least one of the raided buildings through satellite phone intercepts, the Americans also have been developing human intelligence sources in Karachi and providing information to the Pakistani authorities who lead raids.
The Interior Ministry said this week that more than 400 al Qaeda suspects had been captured in Pakistan since last Sept. 11 and that most were quietly turned over to U.S. authorities.
Four FBI agents sat in a black sedan watching each raid as it occurred, Pakistani police said today. The agents left the scene of the second raid once the shooting began but returned as the suspects surrendered, the police said.
That raid targeted a two-story building in an exclusive neighborhood, known as Defense Society because it had been developed on land owned by Pakistani military officers. The entire four-apartment building was leased by the al Qaeda suspects, according to Pakistani officials, but before the raid officials had information that the alleged terrorists were using only one of the apartments.
As uniformed police and plainclothes intelligence officers burst into that apartment, six Arabic-speaking men and a woman immediately surrendered, according to Pakistani police and intelligence sources who participated in the operation.
But as they were leading the suspects down a narrow staircase, a man carrying an automatic weapon emerged from an adjacent apartment and lobbed a grenade at the security personnel and their prisoners.
The surprise attack injured a number of Pakistani officials, including a colonel and a major from the country's military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and the officers were forced to retreat down the stairs. The commotion allowed four of the six detained Arabs to escape and join the man who had hurled the grenade.
"While we were making calls for ambulances and reinforcements, the al Qaeda men took strategic positions on the building rooftop and a window that provided a wide view of the area outside the building," said an intelligence official who was at the scene.
For the next three hours, about 200 police fought a gun battle with the al Qaeda suspects until a volley of tear gas forced them to surrender. In all, two intelligence officers, four policemen and a 4-year-old girl were wounded.
When it ended, the suspects were dragged blindfolded from the apartment, one still waving his arm in defiance, before he was thrown in the back of a Pakistani paramilitary vehicle.
One of the men killed during the raid, believed to be Yemeni, was shot by a police sniper as he fired from the roof of the apartment building.
A senior intelligence official in Karachi said authorities believed two of the detained men participated in the slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on the basis of statements and evidence gathered from key suspects in the case.
As the gun battle raged, two other suspects were arrested at a third apartment, bringing to eight the number of people taken into custody by officials. The arrested include six Yemenis, an Egyptian and a Saudi, Pakistani police said.
"This was the most coordinated strike against al Qaeda sleeper cells in Pakistan since September 11," said a Pakistani intelligence official. "Our sense is that they were all on the run from Afghanistan."
Binalshibh represents one of the most significant captures in the last year. The Yemeni has surfaced at critical points along the evolution of the Sept. 11 plot, and since the attacks he has begun to assume a cult-like status within al Qaeda, according to intelligence officials, who noted that some captured operatives carried his picture.
At Camp David today, President Bush said: "Thanks to the efforts of our folks and people in Pakistan, we captured one of the planners and organizers of the September 11 attack that murdered thousands of people. . . . One by one we are hunting the killers down. We are relentless, we are strong, and we are not going to stop."
Finn reported from Berlin. Staff writer Mike Allen at Camp David contributed to this report.
