New York: The arrest of a close associate of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and key al-Qaida operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Pakistan came after a tip-off from neighbours, hoping for the $ 25 million reward on him, a media report said on March 3.

Time magazine quoted unidentified sources as saying that Pakistani and US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, who captured him in Rawalpindi on March 1, had been led to his hideout through the earlier arrest of an Egyptian in Quetta who had been in contact with Mohammed.

None suspected that Mohammed, who passed himself off as a Saudi plywood exporter, was leader of a radical Islamic cell.

Phone records led agents to Rawalpindi, where investigators say Mohammed had been hiding for 10 days before his arrest.

If bin Laden is the "wrathful figurehead" of al-Qaida, Time says, Mohammed, 38, has been its ringmaster. Several of his captured cohorts have described him as "the Brain".

With 200,000 US and British troops stationed in Persian Gulf ready to move on Iraq, authorities feared that he would activate sleeper cells in the Gulf states or recruit fresh volunteers for suicide attacks against US military targets.

His network of agents in Kuwait (where he was born to a Pakistani father) and in Qatar, two key staging posts for the US command, are still intact, intelligence experts were quoted as saying.

"This is the planner, the key planner of 9/11 and probably al-Qaida's most active planner right up until his capture," said a White House aide.

PTI