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Yemeni police arrest second top al-Qaeda terror suspect
By Mark Huband, security correspondent, in London Published: March 5 2004 4:00 / Last Updated: March 5 2004 4:00

Yemeni police havearrested a founder of an Egyptian militant group linked with al-Qaeda - their second high profile arrest this week of an alleged Islamic extremist.

A government website announced that Imam al-Sharif had been arrested in the mountainous southern province of Abyan, where police had arrested an alleged local al-Qaeda organiser, Abdel Raouf Nassib, two days earlier.

Mr Sharif is a founder of the Egyptian Islamist group Jihad, whose militants within the Egyptian army were responsible for assassinating Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, in 1981. The group split in 1998, and a faction led by Ayman al-Zawahiri united with al- Qaeda and based themselves in Afghanistan.

However, Mr Sharif had argued with Mr Zawahiri during the split, and it is unclear whether he retained contact after Mr Zawahiri became Osama bin Laden's deputy and key ideological adviser.

Separately, Egypt's interior minister yesterday acknowledged that Mr Zawahiri's brother was being held in an Egyptian jail and would be put on trial. Mohammed al-Zawahiri was rumoured to have been arrested three years ago, but Egyptian authorities had refused to confirm it.

Yemeni authorities have not given the reason for Mr Sharif's arrest, nor explained what he had been doing in Yemen and how long he had been there. Mr Nassib's arrest on Tuesday is seen by officials as highly significant because of his alleged role as an al-Qaeda planner in Yemen's Abyan province.

In November 2002 he narrowly escaped death when a missile fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft operated by the CIA hit the car in which he was travelling. The attack killed six men, including Qaed al-Harthi, the alleged planner of an attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2000.

Mr Nassib is alleged to have helped in a jailbreak last year by several men arrested in connection with the attack on the USS Cole.

Yemeni authorities have taken tough action to prevent terrorist attacks, following the terrorist bombing of a French tanker off the Yemeni coast in October 2002.

But inadequate co-ordination between Yemeni and Saudi authorities in efforts aimed at preventing the trafficking of arms across their long and porous common border contributed to last year's attacks in Saudi Arabia, both governments acknowledge. Plans to build a border fence were suspended recently because of a long-standing dispute over the exact line of the border. However, Saudi authorities were yesterday reported as saying improved border patrols had led to the seizure of 71 weapons, 60,000 rounds of ammunition, 30 gun magazines, 100 sticks of dynamite and 14 bombs in the past three months alone.

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