Blast in Pakistan Kills Al Qaeda Commander

The United States and Pakistan seized a series of high-profile figures in the months immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Abu Zubaida, a top al Qaeda recruiter and member of bin Laden's inner circle, was arrested in Faisalabad in March 2002. Ramzi Binalshibh, said to be a key Sept. 11 plotter, was caught in Karachi in September 2002. Six months later, Pakistani agents grabbed Mohammed while he was sleeping in a house in Rawalpindi, not far from the headquarters of the Pakistani military.

The arrests fueled hopes that investigators were closing in on bin Laden and would be able to completely dismantle the al Qaeda central leadership. But in the past two years, the search for ranking al Qaeda figures has sputtered while others have emerged to lead terrorist attacks elsewhere.

In Iraq, for instance, Jordanian fighter Abu Musab Zarqawi has become a leader of the insurgency, pledging loyalty to bin Laden and giving al Qaeda a new base of operations. Al Qaeda has also created affiliates and alliances with regional extremist groups in North Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Rabia was killed Thursday along with four associates in a missile strike in the tribal region of North Waziristan, officials and a witness said Saturday. The incident was first reported by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, which cited witnesses in asserting that the men had been killed by rockets fired by an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone known as a Predator.

In public statements, Pakistani officials declined to say whether Rabia had been killed by an American missile, although several privately confirmed the report. The use of such tactics is highly controversial in Pakistan, especially in the remote tribal areas where there is strong opposition to the presence of any U.S. military forces.

"Here is what I can tell you: Our troops were not involved in the operation, but this is one of the areas where our intelligence and operational cooperation with U.S. services is most intense," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which is near North Waziristan.

"Comments on media reports that it was a Predator strike would invoke sovereignty issues," the official added. "Let's enjoy the fact that al Qaeda has lost another key person."

Rabia's name does not appear on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists. But Pakistani officials described him as a major catch and a close associate of Zawahiri, the second-ranking al Qaeda leader and a fellow Egyptian.

They said Rabia had been the focus of an intense manhunt since the arrest in Pakistan last May of Libbi, a Libyan whom U.S. intelligence sources described at the time as al-Qaeda's third-ranking leader. Libbi and Rabia are suspected of orchestrating two assassination attempts against Musharraf in 2003.

The interrogation of Libbi by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence operatives "confirmed that Abu Hamza Rabia was in touch with Ayman Zawahiri and he was an important connection between Zawahiri and various Al Qaeda cells, at least until last year," said another Pakistani intelligence official who is involved in counterterrorism work in the tribal areas. The official added that contact between Rabia and Zawahiri appears to have ceased during the last several months.

A third Pakistani intelligence official said that for the past few months, Rabia had been "playing hide-and-seek with the Americans, who were on his tail. He was a fast mover who shuttled between the tribal areas and Afghan border areas frequently."

According to Dawn, Rabia died along with four other men, two of them also Arabs, when an explosion destroyed the mud-walled compound where they were staying in the village of Asoray near Miram Shah, the administrative capital of North Waziristan. Local authorities claimed the men died while making bombs. But the newspaper cited witnesses who said the house was destroyed by missiles around 1:45 a.m.

That account was supported by another witness, Zammarud Khan, who runs a grocery store in the village, according to his brother, Wazir, a driver in Karachi. Wazir Khan said in an interview that his brother told him that at least one of the men had just arrived the day before the attack. Following the collapse of Afghanistan's Taliban government in late 2001, al Qaeda members streamed across the border and took refuge among the ethnic Pushtun tribesmen who populate the area. Many subsequently left for other parts of Pakistan, and hundreds have been caught, although some have remained in the tribal region. Earlier this year, a member of al Qaeda, Haitham Yemeni, was killed by a Predator in North Waziristan.

Spokesmen for the U.S. military and the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said they had no information on Rabia or the circumstances of his death.

Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan. Staff writer Dafna Linzer and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.